Read any newspaper or magazine and you’ll see “Star Wars” rather than Star Wars. We were all taught to italicize movies. Why don’t publications do it?
You were taught to italicize? How did you do that on your typewriter?
There are rules (The Chicago Manual of Style or AP Stylebook) to explain how to handle names of movies and books. I don’t have my copies handy, but I’d assume the AP Stylebook calls for quotes. Why? Because that’s how it’s done. Any rules of style are arbitrary and don’t need to give a reason.
Movies, short stories and one-act plays are supposed to be in quotes. Books and longer plays get underlined or italicized.
–Cliffy
The magazine where I work does italicize movie and TV titles, also books. We have a huuuuge stylebook, laying out what gets italicized and what gets put into quotes. And it’s MY job to see that it gets done!
For instance, if a book title is used in an already-italicized paragraph, it gets put into itals AND quotes. But a newspaper title, just itals. Song titles: quotes. Ship names: itals. it goes on and on and on . . .
RealityChuck’s got it straight. Basically, AP Style (which most newspapers use, with slight variations) states that “book titles, computer game titles, movie titles, opera titles, play titles, poem titles, song titles, television program titles, and the titles of lecures, speeches and works of art” all get the following treatment:
- Capitalize main words and preposition & conjunctions of more than four letters.
- Capitalize articles or words with less than 4 letters if it’s the first or last word in a title.
- Put quotes around it, except the Bible and “books that are primarily catalogs of reference material.”
- Translate foreign titles to English, unless it’s known by its foreign name here
So, this is quite different than Chicago style and MLA which (if I’m not mistaken) do make the distinction between what gets underlined (or italicized), and what gets put in quotes. AP style does not underline anything.
It’s all arbitrary, and the style rules you learn for writing in one profession does not necessarily carry neatly over into writing for different disciplines. AP style differs significantly enough from Chicago and MLA to require a bit of retraining if you’re not familiar with the different stylebooks.
It’s my understanding (I read it somewhere a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away) that “in the old days,” newspaper typesetting equipment could not (or could not easily) set italics. Either the fonts were unavailable, or having/setting them was cost-prohibitive, or something. And so that’s how it ended up as part of AP style.
Anyone who has actually worked in newspaper typesetting in days gone by is free to either corroborate this, or announce that I’m full of doody.