How to Capitalise Headlines

If you’re writing a headline or a title, you’ll want to think about how you’re going to capitalise it. There are two styles for capitalising headlines: headline style, and sentence style. I’ll explain headline style in this post and sentence style in the next; you can choose which one you use. Of course, if you’re following a style guide, you should follow those recommendations. As always, whichever you pick, the most important thing is to stick to it!

Headline style

In headline style, you should capitalise the following words of your headline, title or subtitle:

• The first and last words
• The first word of a subtitle, if introduced by a colon (Witchcraft and Wizardry: The Complete Book of Spells). If there’s a dash rather than a colon, you don’t need to do this — it’s not officially considered a subtitle if it’s introduced by a colon.

You should also capitalise all other words, with the exception of:

• Prepositions (more on these later)
• Articles (a, an, the)
• Coordinate conjunctions (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so)
• The second part of a correlative conjunction (e.g. Either X or X, Neither X / nor X, Not Only X / but also X)
• To word to when functioning as the…