Sentence Case vs Title Case

The two styles

The third one is the common mistake. Capitalising every word is not title case — title case leaves the small joining words lowercase, which is exactly what makes it look edited rather than shouted.

The title case rule

Capitalise everything except articles (a, an, the), short conjunctions (and, but, or, nor, so, yet, if) and short prepositions (at, by, for, in, of, off, on, to, up, via, with). Then override that in three cases: the first word, the last word, and any word after a colon.

Note “For” in the second one — capitalised because it ends the title — and “What” in the fourth, capitalised because it follows a colon. Those two exceptions are where most hand-typed title case goes wrong.

Hyphenated words get each part capitalised: “state-of-the-art” becomes “State-of-the-Art”.

Where the style guides disagree

The disagreement is narrow and it is about prepositions.

• AP style lowercases prepositions of three letters or fewer, so “Through” and “Between” are capitalised.
• Chicago style lowercases all prepositions regardless of length, so “through” and “between” stay down.
• APA uses title case for titles of four letters or more, and sentence case in reference lists.

Nobody outside a copy desk will notice which you picked. What people do notice is inconsistency — “The Guide to Writing” in one place and “The Guide To Writing” in another, on the same site.

Which one to use

Sentence case for almost everything on the web. Page headings, buttons, form labels, UI text, email subject lines, and increasingly headlines too — the Guardian, the BBC and most product interfaces have moved to it, because it reads faster. Capital letters interrupt the shape of a phrase, and a reader scanning a page is reading shapes.

Title case for the titles of works: books, films, papers, articles you are citing. Also for publications whose style guide requires it, and for a masthead or a marketing headline where the formality is the point.

All caps for acronyms and very short labels. A whole sentence in capitals is measurably slower to read, because every word becomes the same rectangle.

Capitalized case almost never. It is what you get when a tool capitalises each word without knowing the rule, and it reads as slightly off even to people who could not say why.

Converting text you already have

Retyping a headline to change its case is a waste of a minute, and hand-capitalising introduces exactly the inconsistencies a style guide exists to prevent.

• The title case converter applies the rule above, including the first-word, last-word and after-colon exceptions.
• The case converter offers all twelve cases, keeps your original text untouched, and shows you each style side by side.

One warning about sentence case conversion: it can restore the capital at the start of each sentence and the standalone “I”, but it cannot know that “paris” is a city. Proper nouns always need a read-through afterwards.

Frequently asked questions

Is title case better for SEO? No. Google does not rank on capitalisation. It may affect click-through rate, which is a real effect — but the direction depends on your audience, not on the style.

Does capitalisation affect the character count? No. Capital and lowercase letters each count as one character, so the length of a headline is unchanged by its case. The character counter will confirm it against a 60-character title limit.

What about the first word after a dash? Treat a dash like a colon and capitalise what follows it, if the dash is introducing a new clause.