Trouble with Titles and 'The Yahoo! Style Guide'

As a web writer who writes about arts and entertainment frequently, I have often been tripped up by the proper usage of titles. Do I put the title in quotes? Do I italicize? Do I leave it alone? What to do, what to do! Old style rules held that main proper titles (books, movies, television shows, etc.) be italicized while other lesser titles were put into quotations and of course there were always exceptions here and there. "The Yahoo! Style Guide" has changed those rules and adapted them for web writing to create a set of guidelines that are easy to remember.

It has long been the practice to italicize some titles while put others in quotations but according to "The Yahoo! Style Guide," the rule is now that some titles are treated with quotations while others have no special treatment. Generally, italicizing titles is no longer done as a regular title treatment.

For titles of artistic works like books, movies, chapters, CDs or albums, DVDs, songs, lectures, magazine articles, operas, plays, podcasts and specific podcast episodes, poems, speeches that are titled, TV and radio programs as well as specific TV and radio episodes, web shows (including web series and episodes), and web videos follow the guidelines of being referred to in quotations. Examples would be "True Blood," "Inception," or "The Yahoo! Style Guide." Other examples would be: Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, "You've Got Dead on You" podcast, the Broadway play "Cats" or the "True Blood" episode "Trouble."

In the case of using a title in a headline, you may enclose the title in single quotations (as in Review of 'Inception') or italics (Review of Inception). This is generally done to save space in the headline.

Titles that need no special treatment except for capitalization would include titles of games (video games, board games), magazines and newspaper (the title of the magazine or newspaper receives no special treatment but specific article titles should have quotation marks), software, speech names that are not actual titles (two examples would be the State of the Union which is not in quotations but "The Gettysburg Address," which is a specific title of a speech, would be in quotations), names of websites and blogs (example Associated Content by Yahoo! would not have quotations, but specific articles or blog posts would have quotations - example: "Trouble With Titles and 'The Yahoo! Style Guide'").

When you list titles that are like items, there are two ways to handle them properly. In a bulleted or numbered list, the titles need no special treatment while a simple line list requires quotations.

For example: My favorite movies are "Raiders of the Lost Ark," "Boondock Saints," and "Thunderheart."
My favorite movies are:
1. Raiders of the Lost Ark
2. Boondock Saints
3. Thunderheart

On the flip side, lists of unlike items would require a titled item to be enclosed in double quotation marks. For example: My favorite things to do on Sundays are
1. Take a nap
2. Sit in my garden
3. Watch "True Blood"

For more concise and specific examples of title treatment according to "The Yahoo! Style Guide," check out the online source here.