How to Capitalize a Book Title

Capitalizing a book title can be a little bit scary for some people because it requires an understanding of the parts of speech (which is something many of us manage to never fully absorb). However, it's a lot easier than you may think!

Difficulty:

Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need

• Piece of paper
• Pencil
• Dictionary

1. The first thing for you to do is simply write it out on a piece of paper. You can go ahead and leave every word of the title in lower case to start.

2. Next, you'll want to capitalize the first and the last word of your title. These are always capitalized, no matter what parts of speech they may be. Therefore, if your book is titled "The End," that's exactly as far as you need to go with this!

3. Now you'll want to pick out the words that are nouns or pronouns and capitalize those. Remember, nouns are persons, places or things. Dog, Sarah, School and Desk are all nouns, so go ahead and make those uppercase. Pronouns are basically the same idea--they are used to take the place of a noun. He, She, I, You, We, This, That and They get capitalized as well.

4. Verbs and Adverbs are next in line. Verbs are action words and show what someone or something is doing. One verb that is often overlooked is Be and its variations (Were, Is, Was, Are and Am). Jump, Feel and Think are all examples of verbs. Adverbs are words that are used to describe verbs, and usually end in -ly. So in the phrases "Jump Lightly," "Feel Strongly" and "Think Quietly," it is easy to see that Lightly, Strongly, and Quietly are our adverbs. Capitalize those!

5. When there are hyphenated words, and the second word in the compound carries as much weight as the first (as in "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince"), be sure to capitalize both. However, when the second word is used to modify the first, or is a different part of speech than the first, it should most likely be lowercase (as in "How-to"). You should also capitalize the first word that comes after a colon ("Final Fantasy: A Guide to the Series").

Tips & Warnings

• There are a few words that pretty much never get capitalized (unless they come after a colon). Be sure that the, a, an, of, for, by, to, on, as, for (and) and are all lowercase!