Titles can be tricky, both to create them for our own writing and to properly present them from sources we are using.

Creating Titles

Every essay needs an original title, so as you write your essay, you will need to create a title for it.  The title is a part of the introduction and serves the same purposes:

• To catch the readers’ interest
• To forecast the topic of the essay

The challenge is to create a title that does these things in an interesting way. Some formal essays might benefit from a two-part title, such as: Is It Love: An Exploration of Eros and Agape. But, most college level essays are well served by a short phrase that is just a few words in length. In general, keep these things in mind when choosing a title:

• Don’t be overly obvious. An essay about persuading readers that Iphones are the best cell phone option could do better than to use the title “Iphones”.
• Don’t use the title of the text you’re writing about as the title for your own essay. In this case, that title is already in use. You can nod to it with your title, though, by referencing something specific in the text.
• Don’t use a long sentence as the title. A phrase or very short sentence is a better choice, because it creates some curiosity in your reader.
• Don’t feel that you have to have a title before you begin writing. Many published writers have working titles for their works, but find that they need a new title once the piece is finished.

Presenting the Titles of Texts Within Your Essay

When writing essays that use information from sources, you will often want to include the title of the piece as you are using information from that source. Generally, the expectation is that you only need to state the title within the text once, and after that you can refer to the piece by the author’s name. However, there are certainly times when you want to repeat the title again.

As a general rule, if you are writing an essay about a text (such as a literary analysis essay), you should include the title and the author’s name within the introductory paragraph. After that, you can reference the author by the last name, and the title as needed.

Here are a few basic rules for formatting titles:

• Periodical, website and book titles are always italicized.
• Article, webpage, and chapter titles are not italicized and are placed in quotation marks.
• Every word in a title is capitalized except for conjunctions (small joining words like and, but, or if), articles (a, an, and the), and prepositions (words that show position, like above, on, and between). Also, don’t capitalize “to” when it’s part of a verb (to Learn, to Practice, etc.).
• If a colon is used within the title, the word after the colon is always capitalized, e.g., Raising Golden Retrievers: An Exercise in Power Vacuuming.

“Handling Titles” uses information from:

The Word on College Reading and Writing by Carol Burnell, Jaime Wood, Monique Babin, Susan Pesznecker, and Nicole Rosevear is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.