i thought i read in my grammar book that you’re supposed to capitalize the first and last words of a title and leave the articles (a, an, the) and prepositions lowercase… but what about the long prepositions? the title that made me start wondering was actually “heaven beside you” by alice in chains… (yeah, that’ll show them… i just won’t capitalize ANYTHING… MUAHAHAHA!!!)
I agree with this in principle. However, I used to write for a music magazine, and the style sheet for this particular magazine required that all words in titles should be capitalized. That at least solves the problem of longer prepositions looking funny in lower case.
Capitalization is style rather than grammar, so there are varying rules for titles in different style manuals.
However, the Chicago Manual of Style, 13th Edition, agrees with you:
There are also twenty zillion other nitpicks they address, but you’ll have to buy the book for those.
I work on a (British) newspaper, and our house style is that prepositions of four letters and less are not capitalised, except (I think) With, By, and Over. I think there are a couple of others, but I haven’t been on holiday for a few months and I forget these things.
Basically the answer is that there’s no right or wrong answer - it’s down to the house style of the publication. One thing I have noticed is that the US tends to go for capitals more than the UK - even in newspaper headlines they tend to capitalise every word (eg “Bush ‘Unable To Find Backside With Both Hands’, Says Aide”) whereas we’d never do that in the UK.
r_k, am I right in understanding that the only word in that example headline you would leave uncapitalized is to?
No, in a headline we would not capitalise anything except proper nouns (and the first word in the sentence, obviously). The rules I mentioned were for titles of books, films, songs, plays etc. So, we’d write, for example, “The Bridge Over the River Kwai”, “Singing in the Rain”, etc. Strangely enough, we don’t capitalise French and Italian titles, so, for example, “La bohème”, “Così fan tutte”, “La traviata”. I have no idea why this is.
To me, American newspapers look somehow “old-fashioned” because of their use of capitals in headlines. Also their use of commas as shorthand for “and” (eg “US Troops Capture Saddam, Osama”) is not used in British papers.