Do book titles go in quotes, italics or underline?

Book titles go in italics. Shorter works that live inside a larger one, like poems, short stories, essays, chapters and articles, go in quotation marks. That's the rule in MLA, APA and Chicago, and in almost every book you'll ever read.

So: Mrs Dalloway, but "The Mark on the Wall".

#The simple version

Ask yourself: could this stand on a shelf by itself?

• Yes, it's a whole book (or a film, a magazine, an album): italics.

• No, it lives inside something else (a poem in a collection, a story in an anthology, a chapter, an article, a song): quotation marks.

#Examples

• Novel: Flush by Virginia Woolf

• Essay collection: Upstream by Mary Oliver

• Poetry collection: Dream Work by Mary Oliver

• Single poem: "Wild Geese", from Dream Work

• Short story: "The Lady with the Dog"

• Chapter: "Loomings", the first chapter of Moby-Dick

• Essay in a magazine: "On Keeping a Notebook"

#What about underlining?

Underlining is italics for people without italics. On a typewriter, and in handwriting, you can't slant the letters, so you underline the title instead. If you're writing by hand, underline. Anywhere else, use italics.

(Underlining a title online is especially confusing: it looks like a link.)

#The exceptions

• Newspapers. AP style, which many newspapers and news sites use, doesn't use italics at all. Book titles go in quotation marks there.

• Religious and ancient texts. The Bible, the Quran, the Iliad's Greek original: style guides differ, and many leave scripture without italics or quotes. Follow the guide you're writing for.

• Your own sentence in italics. If the text around it is already italic, the title goes back to upright letters.

• Series. The name of a series is usually neither italic nor in quotes: the Neapolitan novels, the Harry Potter series.

#Capitals in titles

In English, titles normally capitalise the important words (The Old Man and the Sea), not the small ones like and, of, the in the middle. APA is the exception for reference lists, where only the first word, proper names and the word after a colon are capitalised.

#And in your commonplace book?

In my own notes I'm much less strict, I admit. What matters there isn't the italics; it's that the title is there at all. A line without its book is a line you'll spend an hour looking for.

For quoting the words themselves, here's how to quote a book.