Formatting Titles on Twitter and Facebook
Since you can’t use italics on Twitter and Facebook, you have to choose some other way to format titles. Here’s how Grammar Girl readers voted.
I constantly stuggle with how to format book titles and TV show names on Twitter and Facebook. I prefer Chicago style, which says you italicize titles of major works.
I confess that I’ve broken my own rule about being consistent. For example, sometimes I put book titles in ALL CAPS, which is the publishing industry internal style and sometimes I put book titles in quotation marks, which is Associated Press style. No matter what I do, I occasionally get complaints from people who think I’m doing it wrong.
I decided to see what everyone else does. Here’s the result of a poll I did on the Grammar Girl Facebook page.
People overwhelmingly prefer quotation marks, so that is what I’m going to use from now on.
These were the number of votes:
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Quotation Marks: 152
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No Formatting: 15
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All caps: 14
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Flanking underlines: 11
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Flanking asterisks: 6
My favorite thing about Google+ is that you can format text.
Related Article: Capitalizing Titles
About the Author
Mignon Fogarty is the founder of Quick and Dirty Tips and the author of seven books on language, including the New York Times bestseller “Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing.” She is an inductee in the Podcasting Hall of Fame, and the show is a five-time winner of Best Education Podcast in the Podcast Awards. She has appeared as a guest expert on the Oprah Winfrey Show and the Today Show. Her popular LinkedIn Learning courses help people write better to communicate better.
