When writing an English paper, certain formatting rules must be followed regarding the use of italics, quotation marks, and capitalization. Here's a guide to help you understand when to use each:
1. Italics:
- Book or movie titles, unless they are specifically indicated otherwise by the publisher (commonly not used in APA format). For example, "Pride and Prejudice" should be written as "Pride and Prejudice" without quotation marks.
- The names of scientific journals, such as "The New England Journal of Medicine."
- Measures of scale or units of time, for instance, "ranged from 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent)."
- Non-English terms of specific importance, such as the Latin motto of Yale University, "Lux et veritas."
- Sometimes, authors may italicize a word for emphasis, typically the first occurrence in an article.
2. Single Quotation Marks:
- Used less frequently in American English, single quotes are often employed when there is a need to quote within a quotation. For example, "John said, 'Jane asked "how are you?"'" Note that the terminal punctuation mark should be inside the quotes.
3. Double Quotation Marks:
- Indicate a direct quote from a source, such as a book, news article, website, or another paper. For example, "Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe" (Wikipedia, n.d.). If you paraphrase, you do not use double quotes but still need to cite the source.
- Used for direct speech in narrative, with a comma instead of a colon to introduce the speech.
4. Capitalization:
- Proper nouns, including names, both first and last, as in "Mr. John Adam Smith IV."
- Place names, countries, languages, religions, planet names, and any special or unique names.
- The first person pronoun "I" is always capitalized.
- In legal documents, roles or titles may be capitalized, such as "John Smith (the Plaintiff)."
- Days of the week and months are always capitalized, as in "Monday" and "June."
- The first word in a sentence and proper nouns in titles are capitalized, but articles, conjunctions, and prepositions are not, unless they are the first or the last word in a title. For example, the title "Introduction and Background" has only "Introduction" and "Background" capitalized.
Adhering to these rules will ensure that your paper is consistent and follows standard academic conventions.
