Title Case vs. Sentence Case: Which Goes Where?

Title case: the small-word rules

Title case capitalizes the first word, the last word, every noun, verb, adjective, adverb and pronoun. What stays lowercase: articles (a, an, the), coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or, nor, for, so, yet) and prepositions — APA draws the line at four letters, so 'With' is capitalized but 'from' is not. Verbs stay tall no matter how short: Is, Be, Do. Chicago's headline style follows the same pattern with minor dictionary-dependent exceptions.

Both styles capitalize the first word after a colon, which is where subtitles live: 'Writing Under Pressure: How Deadlines Change Style.' Hyphenated compounds capitalize both parts in title case unless the second part is a prefix, and proper nouns capitalize no matter how small: 'The Gulf War and the art of the deal' keeps Gulf and War tall. The last word always capitalizes, even a short preposition: 'What Papers Are For.'

The numbers at a glance

Which case goes where — 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.

Sentence case: where APA hides it

Sentence case capitalizes the first word, proper nouns, and nothing else except words that would be capitalized in an ordinary sentence. The rule exists to make reference lists scannable: when every title reads like a sentence, the journal name in title case pops out as the citation's anchor. A quoted title inside a sentence-case title keeps its original case, so 'A Reading of "Ozymandias"' survives intact.

APA 7 applies it to article titles, book titles, chapter titles and web pages in the reference list — then flips back to title case for the journal name that follows. Students copy titles from databases that store them in title case, which is why converted APA reference lists need a manual pass, entry by entry. The reverse error also exists: MLA lists typed in sentence case look wrong on the Works Cited page at a glance.

Why the same title prints two ways

The styles disagree on philosophy, not typography. APA treats reference titles as descriptive data — sentence case keeps them uniform so the retrieval information stands out. MLA treats titles as quoted works with their published form preserved, so title case follows the original wherever it appears. Chicago's headline style splits the difference and keeps title case in both notes and bibliography. Neither is more correct; they optimize for different reading tasks.

This is also why mixing styles inside one paper fails so visibly. A literature review that follows APA but copies MLA-formatted entries from a humanities database carries sentence-case titles in one section and title-case in another, usually on the same page. The fix is the pass described in the next section. Citation managers like Zotero can batch-convert titles, but they mis-handle subtitles and proper nouns, so review every line.

The five-minute checking pass

Before submission, open your reference list and check one thing per entry: the case of the title and the case of the journal or book that follows. In APA, that means sentence-then-title; in MLA, title-then-title. Then check your own headings for the same consistency — one lowercase heading among title-case headings reads as an error. Do the pass after your citation manager has finished its import, not before.

Search for the tell-tale database artifacts while you are there: ALL CAPS titles copied from PubMed, or titles ending without punctuation where the database truncated. Both mark a reference list that was pasted rather than formatted, and both take seconds for a grader to notice from the top of the page. Proper nouns are the exceptions the pass exists for — check them entry by entry.

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.