How do you Title your Posts?
During my college days, back when I had to come up with headlines for our newspaper, we used the AP Stylebook. I roughly remember that words that don’t have meaning of their own were lowercased and meaningful words got capitalized. This is more or less what I’ve done here, on my blog.
The title of this post, “How do you Title your Posts,” is an example: “How” is the first word, so it gets capitalized (beginning of sentence). “Do” and “you” are meaningless on their own; they just glue to other parts, so lowercase. “Title” and “Posts” are the main parts, so they stand on their own. The connecting word between them, “your,” is what links them, so lowercase. Another way to look at this is that if I were to title this post “How Title Posts,” it still conveys a meaning — but “how do you your” is gibberish.
If you find this explanation confusing and think I make this up as I go, you’re right. That’s why my blog’s titles are messy. I want to do something about it, to come up with some guide to follow.
We had a conversation around the content of blog titles, but not syntax. From what I can tell, we bloggers capitalize titles in mostly three different ways. If I use my title here as an example again:
- How do you title your posts
- How Do You Title Your Posts
- How Do you Title your Posts
I don’t like to capitalize just the first word (1: sentence case). It feels lazy to me. Not every post on my blog gets a title, so posts that do need to have presence, not look like they’re apologizing for being late to the party. You may disagree, and plenty of blogs choose this route.
The next one (2: title case) is slightly better, but not by much. It feels forced in a way, because some of the small words are used as connecting glue: they have no power on their own and shouldn’t be capitalized.
The advantage of the first two methods is that they’re consistent and easy to follow. When you start playing around with which words get capitalized and why, as we have in 3, things get complicated and inconsistent.
I went back to check the AP Stylebook says:1
Capitalize only the first word and proper nouns in headlines that use AP style. Exception: The first word after a colon is always uppercase in headlines. Always capitalize the first letter of a headline, even if it starts with a proper name such as iPhone or eBay, though recasting may be the better choice.
Ugh!
First, it takes me back to grammar school. Fine, proper nouns are not that hard, they are basically names: Mount Everest is a proper noun, mountain is not. But then I also need to remember to capitalize the first letter after a colon, and what I especially don’t like is to capitalize iPhone as IPhone if it’s the first word in the title. It looks so of that they even suggest avoiding it and finding a workaround… So why bother?
Besides, these guides mean that most of my titles will end up having only the first word capitalized. Here are a few random titles from my blog: “My blog fails accessibility tests, and that’s okay” or “I don’t use soap for all my dishes.” This feels especially off with series titles, like my Emacs Config Gems. Writing those as “Emacs Config Gems - Part X” is good. “Emacs config gems - part x” is not (technically I could argue an em dash is like a colon, so the word “part” is capitalized, which is slightly better, but it feels like a hack to me).
At this point, I’m basically where I started. The words that seem important — for reasons I cannot justify with any official guides — get capitalized. Call it the unsupported title case… case.
Footnotes
1 At least, the 55th edition. The current one is behind a paywall.