Punctuating the Titles of Plays, Books, Poems, Magazines, Movies, and Television Programs

Lesson Plan - Get It!

Audio:

As you progress through the higher grades, not only will you be expected to write more papers, but you will also be expected to read more frequently and from a more diverse repertoire of materials.

When the worlds of reading and writing and writing about what you read intersect, you need to be proficient in correctly citing texts within your document.

• How do you correctly reference published works, copyrighted works, and sources for copyrighted works in your writing — including books, newspaper articles, YouTube channels, websites, songs, and TV show episodes?

That's right, even if you're writing a journal entry about what happened last night on your favorite show, you must format titles properly.

On top of that, the rules change as everything becomes digital and available in new formats. (The Perdue Online Writing Lab is a great resource to stay up-to-date.)

The two forms of formatting you will generally use are italics and "quotation marks." You also need to know when to use lowercase letters in longer titles, but start with the basics and work your way from there.

Look at a few examples.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is being produced by our local theater group.

In this sentence, the only published work or source for published or copyrighted work referenced is Hamlet, which is italicized. This means plays are italicized.

Stephen Spielberg directed Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.

In this sentence, you only need to identify the movie title: Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Movie titles, like play titles, are italicized.

My favorite television program in the 90s was Seinfeld.

Finding the title, Seinfeld, we see it's a TV show, and it, too, is italicized.

Hinton's The Outsiders contains one of Frost's most beautiful poems, "Nothing Gold Can Stay."

This sentence has two titles. The first, The Outsiders, is a book title. Like all book titles, it is italicized.

• Wait, what's this?
• A poem? With quotation marks?

When you thought you had this all under control comes a poem to throw you off your game.

• What did the first four titles have in common?

They are all stand-alone pieces, meaning they don't need the help or support of any other published medium to make it to the public!

A poem must usually be published in another book of poetry, a textbook, a novel, etc., to make it to the public.

If a piece of work needs support from another work, it gets quotation marks. Therefore, "Nothing Gold Can Stay" is put within quotation marks.

My favorite of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is "The Miller's Tale."

After the last explanation, this mention of a work within a work should be simple. The stand-alone piece Canterbury Tales is italicized, while "The Miller's Tale," one of the tales within the collection, is surrounded by quotation marks.

My older brother watches some questionable channels on YouTube, but I like "Nerdy Nummies with Ro."

There are even rules for YouTube! Think of it as TV or a stand-alone source, and every channel or video as a piece that needs to be held in place by quotation marks.

• So, what do you think you would do with music?
• An album title and song title? What about a playlist and a song title?

Well, think about which is the stand-alone and which needs the support of quotation marks. The same holds for websites, magazines, TV show episodes, etc.

Now that you're getting a grip on punctuation, continue to the Got It? section for some practice!