
The title converter includes a helpful explanation about why each word is capitalized or not. (In “ Headline Readability Measured in Context”) Mixed caseĪ mix of upper case letters and lower case letters.

Earl English found that Cheltenham bold all-capitals were read 18% slower than lower case in the same face. Faster reading of the lower-case print is due to the characteristic word forms furnished by this type.”īreland and Breland reported an 18.9% loss in readability for all capital headlines. Also, most readers judge all capitals to be less legible. “All-capital print greatly retards speed of reading in comparison with lower-case type. Miles Tinker, renowned for his landmark work “ Legibility of Print” and studies on legibility and readability, tells us: Don’t do it unless a style guide requires it. I typically avoid writing in all caps as it’s the online form of YELLING at your reader. All capsĪLL THE SILICON VALLEY COPYCAT CITIES AROUND THE WORLD Then I usually write words such as ‘in,’ ‘and,’ ‘a,’ and ‘the’ in lower case (if they’re not at the start of the headline). So now I prefer all upper case unless I know editors like mixed case. On Medium, I used this for a while before realizing many publications used mixed case formatting. The good thing about sentence case is no one can dispute what should be upper case. A lot of the time, we used sentence case for headlines. Like:Īll the Silicon Valley copycat cities around the worldĪs an online content coordinator, I’ve looked after the websites of many organizations. The headline is written as a sentence with proper nouns capitalized. Comparison between styles using real headlines.

Let’s understand more about headlines so we can quickly write one up, and then get onto writing more content rather than umming and ahhing about formatting. However, I’ve gotten through English in high school, spent five years writing academic papers in university, and I write and manage content on many organizational websites for a living. I don’t want to spend ages remembering what a preposition or conjunction is every time I write a damn headline. There are comparison tables to help us identify whether to capitalize the first word, last word, adverbs, articles, prepositions, conjunctions, so on and so on. There are styles for journalism, such as AP Title Case, New York Times Title Case, and Wikipedia Title Case.
#Ap headline manual#
There are styles common to academia, such as The Chicago Manual of Style, MLA Title Case, and APA Title Case. It can be damn confusing to figure out what to do about headlines.Īfter a half-hour browse online, my head is spinning from the different types of possibilities to write English headlines. Have you ever submitted an article and had your headline edited?
