When it comes to writing an essay, one of the things you may need to mention is the title of a book. There can be many reasons why a book title may be mentioned, and it is common to refer to a book title for many types of essays. The specific way to write a good book title is not quite as simple as it may seem. It can depend on the specific subject, and also the formatting requirements. You may be confused as to whether the title and author needs to be written in quotation marks or if it needs to be underlined. Luckily, in this guide, you can learn all of the essentials on how to write a good book title in an essay.
Writing a Good Book Title in APA Format
Firstly, let’s start with how to write a good book title in the APA format. This tends to be one of the most popular formats. It is vital to understand the rules for writing a book title in the APA format. In terms of capitalization, you should capitalize the first word and words that have more than four letters.
If it has a hyphen then both words should be capitalized. Rather than using the italics font, the entire book title should be left in quotation marks. You can write the author’s name with the surname and initials of the first name. There should be a comma to separate different authors. The author portion should be finished with a period.
Citing a Good Book Title in MLA Format & Chicago
Another popular format for essays is MLA and Chicago. They both have similar rules. A citation is used when you directly quote something from the book. When you are citing a book title in MLA, you need to include the full book name in italics and end it with a period. You should also include the publisher, and publication year. If the work being sourced is a chapter or part of a larger work, then this should also be cited. When you are writing the book title in both of these formats it is important to capitalize the first letters of all of the nouns and adjectives. The name should be kept in italics.
Writing Different Types of Book Titles
Headings of full works such as novels or plays should be in italics. Headings of books that are included as part of larger works should be written in quotation marks. Headings of short works such as poems such should also be written in quotation marks.