Underline or "Quote"?
When you state the title of a work, you must be sure to indicate what type of source you are referring to. This is done by underlining or quoting the work. The following list will help you determine which of the two to use.
Underline the titles of:
Books Gone With the Wind
Periodical Titles Time, Newsweek
Long Poems Paradise Lost
Plays Romeo and Juliet
Movies/TV Series Survivor
*it is important to note that you may use italics instead of underlining to indicate the type of a work. However, you are not permitted to mix and match the two- if you use italics, every book title, long poem, etc. that you mention in your writing must be italicized. Accordingly, if you underline a title, all other larger works need to be underlined.
Set in quotation marks the titles of:
Chapter Titles "How to Choose a Topic"
Essays "Civil Disobedience"
Articles "The No-Pesticide Revolution"
Short Poems "Kubla Khan"
TV Episodes "Trouble With Tribbles"
Titles of Web Pages "Evaluating World Wide Web Information"
Things get more complicated when titles include other titles inside them. When you have a title embedded within another title follow the examples below:
- an underlined title within a title in quotation marks:
"Return to the Titanic: Gash Is Dashed" [an article about a ship]
- an underlined title within another underlined title:
An Introduction to Hamlet and King Lear: Themes and Characters. [a book about two plays]
- a title set in quotes within another title set in quotes:
"The Dream of ‘Young Goodman Brown.’" [an article about a short story]
- a title set in quotes within a title that is underlined:
Twentieth-Century Interpretations of "The Fall of the House of Usher." [a book about a short story]
Finally, remember this: DO NOT USE BOLD IN YOUR ESSAYS!