Do You Underline Book Titles?

What replaced the underline, style by style

Every current college style guide italicizes book titles, and all three say so explicitly. MLA 9 italicizes standalone works - books, films, albums, websites - and wraps shorter pieces inside quotation marks. APA 7 italicizes book titles too, with the additional twist of sentence case: only the first word, the first after a colon, and proper nouns get capitals. Chicago italicizes with headline case, capitalizing major words. The underline was always a typewriter workaround - mechanical keyboards had no italic typeface, so style guides accepted the underline as a visible stand-in - and it retired when word processors made italics universal in the 1990s. The guides keep a one-line note about the retired convention precisely because students keep asking about it, which this page answers once and for all.

The instinct to underline usually means the writer learned one of the legacy conventions and never got the retirement memo, which is harmless in isolation but expensive on a title page. Graders read underlined titles as a formatting-system error, because the underline breaks the visual signal italics provide: italics mark the title without interrupting the line, and modern style guides treat that signal as part of the citation's meaning. If your draft still underlines, run the style-switcher on the title block - it converts a citation between MLA 9, APA 7 and Chicago and shows exactly which elements italicize, quote, or stay roman in each system. The conversion takes ten seconds and retires the underline question permanently, because the visual difference between the systems is small and the logic is shared.

The numbers at a glance

Book title formatting by style — the range, and where each row actually shows up in coursework. Skim it first; the sections below explain why the range exists and which row applies to you.

The handwritten exception and its limits

Underlining survives in exactly one classroom context: handwritten work, where italics are physically impossible. When in-class essays are handwritten, underlining a book title is the accepted substitute for italics, and most instructors accept either on handwritten exams - some prefer the underline because it is unambiguous. The substitute exists for legibility, not tradition, and the distinction keeps the typed rule intact. The same logic once explained blue-book conventions, and it is the only place the old rule still lives. The moment the same essay moves to a computer, the substitute retires: a printed version of handwritten notes italicizes, because the reason for the substitution is gone.

Legal citation is the other surviving underline zone, and it is niche enough that most students never hit it. Court-document conventions traditionally underlined case names rather than italicizing, and some state-court formatting requirements still ask for it; Bluebook-era practitioners now italicize in filings, and academic legal writing follows the italic convention. If you are writing a political-science paper, you italicize case names like Brown v. Board of Education like any other title. The how-to-cite-a-court-case page covers the citation anatomy; for title formatting, the academic rules are uniform and the underline stays retired outside handwriting. Political science students should check whether their department follows Bluebook italics or a house convention, but either way the answer is not underlining in typed prose.

The container rule that decides italics or quotes

The italic decision follows the container principle, and the book is the easiest case: standalone works italicize, works inside other works take quotation marks. A novel italicizes; a short story in an anthology takes quotes. A book italicizes; a chapter inside it takes quotes. A journal italicizes; an article inside it takes quotes. A website italicizes in MLA 9; a page inside it takes quotes. The do-you-italicize-website-titles page and the do-you-italicize-article-titles page apply the same rule to their genres, which is why memorizing one principle beats memorizing forty title cases. Standalone means the work stands on its own as a published object; container means it lives inside one, and the nesting decides the marks.

Two complications matter at the college level. First, the punctuation around titles stays roman: the comma after an italicized title is not italic, and neither is the quotation mark that closes a chapter title - students who italicize the closing comma are formatting the punctuation, not the title. Second, titles inside titles stack: when an italicized book's title appears inside a quoted chapter title, the inner title reverts to roman. These are edge cases worth two minutes rather than anxiety, because the title-page-generator formats the common cases correctly and the verification checklist catches the exotic ones before submission. The exceptions cluster in anthology-heavy humanities papers, so literature students hit them most and benefit most from the two-minute audit.

The case rules inside the italic title

Italics decide the font; capitalization is a separate switch that styles disagree on. MLA 9 uses headline case for book titles - capitalize the first word, the last word, and every major word, while articles, coordinating conjunctions and short prepositions stay lowercase. APA 7 uses sentence case for book titles in references - capitalize only the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns - so The Great Gatsby keeps its capitals but The impact of sleep on memory becomes The impact of sleep on memory: a longitudinal study. The colon rule trips everyone once, and the fix is remembering that APA treats everything after the colon as a new sentence. Chicago uses headline case like MLA, with its own short-preposition list.

The fastest audit is to pick the style once, from the syllabus, and apply it to every title in the document - mixed systems are what actually cost marks. The how-to-cite-a-textbook page shows the full reference anatomy for books in both systems, case rules included. When the draft is finished, one read of the reference list checking only italics and case catches every drift, and the copy-paste from the citation-generator output keeps the machine-formatted entries from being hand-retyped into errors. Hand-retyping is where sentence case quietly becomes headline case, and the drift is invisible until a grader circles it. Underlining never reappears in that audit, because nothing in a current style guide asks for it.

The format check graders run before reading

Graders check mechanics first and content second — a two-minute scan that decides the paper's first impression. The list: correct font and size, double spacing throughout (no stray single-spaced paragraphs), one-inch margins, page numbers in the right corner, the required title-page fields, heading levels used consistently, and references formatted with hanging indents. Each item is trivial; missing two costs measurable points in most rubrics.

Do this scan on the exported PDF, not the working document — export quirks (shifted margins, dropped page numbers, orphaned headings) only appear there. The style switcher below shows the same source formatted in APA 7, MLA 9 and Chicago side by side, which is the fastest way to catch the format you've been half-remembering from the wrong course.