When you go to capitalize the title of your blog or article, do you often wonder which words to capitalize and which to avoid? There are some basic rules you should follow.

How to capitalize your blog or article title. The first and last words of a title should always be capitalized. Nouns, verbs, pronouns, adverbs, and adjectives are also always capitalized. Articles should not be capitalized, and neither should prepositions or conjunctions that are less than five letters in length.

In this article, I’ll explain some basic rules to consider for capitalizing titles. Then I’ll give you a free online tool that you can use to take the guesswork out of it.

How to Capitalize Titles

It might seem like capitalizing titles is something that should be pretty easy and straightforward.

But there’s actually not one universal system for doing it.

How you capitalize your title will depend on what style guide you’re using. The three big ones that are used most often are Associated Press, Chicago Manual of Style, and MLA.

However, there are some basic rules that apply to all of them. If you follow just these rules, they’ll get you most of the way there. So you may miss some rare niche cases, but your capitalization should be correct for the most part.

First and Last Words

In any title, the first and last words are always capitalized. It doesn’t matter how long they are, or if they violate any of the other rules below. Just always capitalize the start and end of your title.

DO Capitalize These Parts of Speech

In titles, you should always capitalize specific types of words.

These are:

• Nouns
• Verbs
• Pronouns
• Adverbs
• Adjectives

I’ll be honest, even as a professional writer I often forget which of these are which sometimes. So this list might not be too helpful. But if you know your different parts of speech from English class, this should help you out.

DON’T Capitalize Articles

Articles are words that come before a noun.

The most common ones are A, AN, and THE.

As a general rule, you don’t usually need to capitalize words that are only two or three letters long.

DON’T Capitalize Some Prepositions

Like articles, prepositions also come before a noun or pronoun. However, they express a relation to another word in the clause.

Prepositions get tricky because some of them you should capitalize, while others you don’t.

What’s the rule?

Don’t capitalize prepositions that are less than 5 letters long.

So you would capitalize some prepositions like AFTER.

But you wouldn’t capitalize shorter ones like AT, ON, FROM, BY, or TO.

Are your blog posts long enough? Read my How Long Should A Blog Post Be? article to make sure!

DON’T Capitalize Some Coordinating Conjunctions

These are placed between words or phrases. Just like prepositions, you shouldn’t capitalize conjunctions that are 5 letters or less.

Some examples to avoid capitalizing include: AND, BUT, NOR, OR, FOR, YET, and SO.

Does Capitalization Matter?

With so many rules, you may wonder to yourself. Does it really matter? Is it really worth all of the effort?

In my opinion, the answer is… not really.

If you’re writing for yourself, no one really cares if you capitalize your titles correctly or not. I’ve written hundreds of blog titles, and nobody has ever called me out on my capitalization.

Usually if I’m just writing for my own blog, I just capitalize every single word in the title and don’t worry about it. It’s consistent and then I don’t have to think about it.

For more formatting tips, check out my How To Format A Blog Post article!

Free Title Capitalization Tool

While I take a very laissez-faire approach to titles on my own writing, that isn’t true if I’m writing for somebody else.

For clients I’ll always make sure that my capitalization is correct.

For that I defer to one of many online tools that you can use to correctly capitalize your titles for you.

My go-to choice is capitalizemytitle.com, but there are other options out there.

All you do is copy your title and paste it into the field on the website, and it will automatically format it according to the style guide that you’ve selected. Then just copy and paste it back into your document and you’re good to go.

Conclusion

Correctly capitalizing titles of your blogs, articles, essays, or other forms of writing can be hard.

There is no single set of guidelines that apply to all different kinds of writing. It will depend on which style guide you’re required to use.

However, there are a few basic rules that will get you most of the way there. I’ve outlined these today. So now you should be better equipped to correctly capitalize your titles!

Or if you’re lazy and constantly forgetting the rules like me, just use an online tool to do it for you.