5/6/2008
Should Every Word In A Blog Post Title Be Capitalized?
Confused Blogger Seeks Clarity
Friday at SOBCon, a few of us were talking about whether every word in a blog post title should be capitalized. Does anybody know?
In print media, prepositions, conjunctions, and articles are not capitalized in headlines unless they are the first word. Some bloggers follow these rules, but many capitalize every word. Does it matter? Joanna Young seemed to think there might be some SEO impact one way or the other.
I wonder if someone like Deb or Kristen could clear this up.
This is a problem when I do link posts. For my anchor text, I like to use the title of the original post. Should the titles be reprinted with the original punctuation, or, for consistency, should they be changed to one capitalization style?
Emerson was right — a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. But is the cap/post title issue foolish or fundamental?
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26 Responses to Should Every Word In A Blog Post Title Be Capitalized?
Thanks for asking the question Brad. Hopefully someone will have the answer!
Joanna
Maybe it’s, er, fundamentally foolish?
Good question, Brad. Let’s see if the vast research department can figure this one out, too!
This is actually one of the topics I keep meaning to write about, but here’s a handy resource for you:
http://grammartips.homestead.com/caps.html
You capitalize the first and last words, all the nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions of 5 letters or more.
You do NOT capitalize articles, conjunctions, or the word “to” when it’s part of an infinitive … unless they’re the first word.
Basically, what I was taught in second grade? You capitalize the “Important” words–the ones that give the title substance–and leave the unimportant ones lowercase.
Hi Deb, thanks for the tip – very concise link. It sounds like bloggers should follow standard punctuation rules. I wonder why so many don’t. ?? Puzzling to me.
Um, I think different rules do apply to internet writing. Going to keep searching for the resource that flipped me over to writing headlines this way
Unless maybe I just flipped!
Joanna
Joanna, the only special rule grammatical rule for internet writing i’m familiar with is using a dash instead of a colon or semicolon. Are there others besides the caps issue?
Brad, I don’t think it affects SEO, but I’ve never read anything to prove that. I think it’s a bit easier for many people to read headlines when you don’t capitalize every word. And I personally tend to ascribe a little more authority or literacy to someone who follows the old-school method of leaving some words uncapitalized.
But for most audiences, it probably doesn’t matter much.
Hi Easton, thanks for the input. It’s good to know even a few people still see a connection between authority and correct grammar. Even if most people don’t care, when in doubt, you can’t go wrong writing correctly.
Brad, I took my chance and asked Brian Clark on Twitter
He said…
I don’t capitalize ‘and’ & ‘the’ in headlines, except sometimes when they start the second line (yesterday’s post I didn’t)
But I do capitalize words like ‘with’ that you technically shouldn’t… just presents better imho.
So his reason is based on presentation.
Joanna
Joanna, thanks so much! Can’t imagine a better authority than Brian Clark, but it’s beginning to look like the “official” rules of blogging grammar are still a work in process.
It’s interesting, isn’t it, how more and more things change while so many of them stay the same? I have no problem with things changing, so long as people have some idea that there are rules involved. So many people don’t seem to even care–THAT irks me! (grin)
You know… we can solve this whole issue by only using lower case from now on. C’mon! Who’s with me!
Bob, you first!
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I generally capitalize anything with 4 or more letters, including prepositions. And verbs are capitalized regardless of length. First and last word always capped. Use numerals instead of writing out numbers. Cap all parts of a hyphenated word. Cap the first word after a colon.
Combo of grammar rules on title case and marketing tricks to grab attention.
Sorry to be late in the game!
kk
Kristen, thanks for stopping by Word Sell. Seems like you’ve developed your own set of rules might make an interesting post. If nothing else, this conversation shows that for blog grammar, there is no definitive set of rules.
Interesting post, I think I will go on capitalizing
Great write-up. I’ve always wondered about blog posts being capitalized or not. Wouldn’t it be interesting if Google started ranking sites based on gramatical correctness?
Periodic – Haha, that would be fun to see but also disastrous for many of us.
I’m still trying to figure out the ‘correct’ answer to the title capitalization issue though, as well as proper SEO use of capitalization in tags and categories in WordPress. Any help there would be greatly appreciated as well!
I have always capitalized every article I publish, it just doesn’t look right when the words don’t start with a capital letter. Don’t think it matter either way with the search engines though in terms of SEO.
I just use the official Google blog as a reference for convention, which presents yet a third choice:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/
Basically they use sentence capitalization rules, only first word and proper names capitalized. I think it looks better too, it seems more classy and subdued.
To me it doesn’t matter in search engines, first letter capitalized or not. But in real grammar, I think it should, just like you see in reputable newspapers and magazines.
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I found your blog post because I am trying to decide whether I should capitalize the title of my blog— not my posts, but my whole blog. Since I’ve been in grad school the last several months, I’ve been writing in APA style, and I’ve gotten into the habit of writing post titles like APA article titles— only the first word capitalized and only any other word in the title that is traditionally capitalized; e.g., How I decided to learn ASL and become an ASL-English interpreter.
P.S. Now that I think of it, I guess I answered my own question, because the title of a blog is always capitalized in APA format. Duh! 8-}
I’ve got to speak up. It seems that I’ve lived too long to be in the main-stream of beliefs and practices, even for a presumably simple thing like the rules of English in the area of proper capitalization of titles.
I’ve always been an English-language wonk. I really care about things like this. The language is as important as human interaction — it breaks down if we don’t have standards for that.
All that said, when I grew up in the ’60s and early ’70s, the standard rules of English mandated very different styles for titles. There were two standards then, too, and either one was correct, with one exception.
(1) Capitalize every word in the title, and then underline the whole title.
(2) Use All-Caps — capitalize every letter in the title, no underline.
The one case where the rule is different is when the title is not used for the title of the current document being written but is instead used within the body of the document as a reference to some other document. In that situation, if using style (1), instead of underlining the title, put it in double-quotes, but still capitalize every word in it. The style (2) rule is the same even in the body of another document.
This is what was in all of the English textbooks in the ’60s when I was taught English in school. I believe we learned this in junior high school (no, not “middle school,” that being a modern affectation. I’m from the west and that term was almost never used west of the Missouri River. Of course, that term was in use in the east, and I cannot speak for what might have been the style rules in England and its empire during that time. I digress). I do believe that this change, which I started to see in the ’70s in publications, was initiated in Britain and quickly spread to New York City, and The Big Apple’s (notice capitalization of “the” in that proper noun, another standard in my youth that has since changed) media influence has gradually eroded our country’s previous rules for American English.
These changes, which used to take several generations, have now been greatly sped up by modern telecommunication. The facts that New York is the geographically closest place in American to England, and most culturally intimately-connected, as well (more so than is New England), and its dominant size as a city, have given it much cultural influence on the country, but it was never strong enough to change anything so quickly and so pervasively in America until our modern electronic media came into being. Television made these changes; in its heyday, radio didn’t change national styles to a great extent, but television has done so. Of course, this last generation has totally been dominated by media outlets with the advent of the World Wide Web.
The reason I point out all of that is because, for people like me, who are merely in their 50s, there seem to have been radical changes in just what constitute correct English. That single generation has seen all of this, and it frustrates and confuses us. Until we dinosaurs have died out, the title structures I have specified will continue to be used by a significant minority of people. After we’re gone, it will be simpler for you folks that came on decades later.
I will add an observation, from the vantage point of one who has experienced both sets of rules and the shift between them. These particular changes (not all changes — I’ll avoid being a curmudgeon), in rules regarding titles, are a degradation in the quality of the language itself. The standards that were in effect when I grew up resulted in more clarity of written expression. There was no mistaking that a particular string of words on a page were in fact a title. That isn’t the case today. As a person is reading, he/she can see those words, where some of the words aren’t capitalized and there is no underline of the whole, and miss the writer’s intention for that group of words to be understood as a title. Confusion can occur. Reading speed must decrease in order to correctly understand it, or reading comprehension will suffer; one or the other is inevitable, perhaps both. You see, our forbears had good reason to establish the rules of English (however, I won’t defend spellings, though they are what they are for historical reasons) that the general dumbing-down of the language is eroding. I do not recognize the New York Times’ Style Guide as an authority of proper English usage. They’ve been leading the decline, eager to adopt each new loss of clarity and knowledge. It is sad, because we’re losing a lot.
Now you have the perspective of someone who remembers these changes. I humbly thank you for indulging my reminiscences and my grumbling, and I apologize for burdening you with same.