The meeting ran twenty minutes, and the subject was the word "with." Two people, one headline, and a company style guide that said "Use title case for blog posts" and nothing more. She wanted "How to Get Ahead With Freelance Writing," because AP capitalizes prepositions of four letters or longer. He wanted that "With" lowercase, because prepositions are small words and small words don't get capitals. He was following a rule he half remembered, from a guide nobody had named, in a document that never specified one.
Both were confident. The document was useless. Some version of this fight happens in every team that publishes. Title case looks simple until you have to enforce it; sentence case looks simpler and hides almost no arguments at all. Knowing which one you are using, and where each one wins, is the difference between a style guide that settles debates and one that starts them.
The rules of title case, properly stated
Strip away the guide-by-guide detail and title case is three rules.
- Capitalize the first word and the last word, always, even "a," "the," and "of."
- Lowercase the glue: articles (a, an, the), coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or, nor, for, so, yet), and prepositions.
- Capitalize everything else: nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and subordinating conjunctions like "if" and "because."
Rule three is where humans trip, because it fights intuition. The words people get wrong are the short verbs and pronouns: "is," "be," "was," "its," "his." Length is not the category; part of speech is. "Is" is two letters and a verb, and every major guide capitalizes it.
Then there is "to," the eternal edge case. Most guides lowercase it whether it arrives as a preposition or as the marker of an infinitive, a stubborn minority of house styles capitalize the infinitive "To," and copy desks have filled entire evenings with the argument. If your guide does not say, pick a side and write the ruling down.
The divergence that matters in daily work is between AP and Chicago. AP capitalizes any word of four letters or more, prepositions included. Chicago lowercases all prepositions however long they grow. So "With" wears a capital in an AP headline and a lowercase in a Chicago one, and both headlines are correct inside their own systems.
| Word | AP | Chicago | Why they differ |
|---|---|---|---|
| With | With | with | Four-letter preposition |
| Between | Between | between | Same rule, longer word |
| Is | Is | Is | A verb; both capitalize verbs |
| If | If | If | Subordinating conjunction |
| to | to | to | Both lowercase it, mostly |
Why the web drifted to sentence case
Sentence case is what it sounds like: capitalize the first word and any proper nouns, then stop. Over the past fifteen years, huge portions of the web moved here, from newsrooms to the UK government's own content style, which prescribes sentence case for page titles on GOV.UK, to the settings menus of most software you own.
The typographic reason: capital letters are tall, blocky, and rare in normal reading. When a headline capitalizes every word, every word takes on the same blocky silhouette and none of them stand out, and scanning slows to word-by-word. Sentence case keeps the natural shape of words, so the proper nouns and unusual words, the things worth spotting, actually pop. Usability researchers, the Nielsen Norman Group among them, recommend sentence case for headings and interface text for roughly this reason.
The quieter reason is bureaucratic, and it is my favorite: sentence case ends the arguments. There is no AP-versus-Chicago fight in sentence case because there is no word list. "With" is lowercase everywhere. The intern and the art director produce identical headlines without booking a meeting. If your team's opening scene sounded familiar, sentence case is the exit.
Where title case still earns its keep
This is not a eulogy. Title case carries visual mass, and mass is exactly what some formats need: book covers, album titles, legal headings, formal report covers, course catalogs. A design that leans on type alone, no image, big centered words, wants the density that title case provides. A headline competing for attention inside a list of other headlines wants the opposite.
Citation styles follow their own logic, which surprises people the first time. An APA reference list sets article titles in sentence case and journal names in title case, so the journal appears to shout while the article whispers. Chicago, meanwhile, wants book titles in title case. You do not get to vote on any of this; you follow the format your field demands, and a separate guide to citation basics compared maps that territory.
Consistency is the actual rule
The choice between the two cases matters less than the enforcement of whichever one you pick. A site where the navigation says "Pricing & Plans," the buttons say "Get started," and the blog headlines alternate style by author's mood looks unedited in a way visitors feel before they can name it. The fix is one sentence, written down where the work happens: "Headlines: sentence case. Buttons and nav: title case." Whatever your sentence says, it beats a folder of precedent and guesswork.
Enforcement at scale is mostly mechanical. Export your headlines into one column, alphabetize the list with a text sorter, and read it top to bottom; mixed capitalization is far easier to spot in a flat column than across twenty page designs. Run the corrections through a case converter for the first pass, then finish by hand, because no converter knows AP from Chicago, and none of them can recognize a proper noun. Email subject lines deserve the same treatment. They are headlines in miniature, and your email etiquette document should say which case they wear.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should blog headlines be title case or sentence case?
There is no universal rule. The web has drifted toward sentence case for readability and because it ends word-list arguments, but serious publications use both. Pick one per context, write it down, and apply it everywhere.
Is "Is" capitalized in a title?
Yes, in every major style guide. "Is" is a verb, and verbs are capitalized however short. The same goes for "Be," "Am," "Was," and short pronouns like "It" and "His."
What gets capitalized after a colon?
It depends on the guide and what follows. Chicago capitalizes the first word after a colon in a title. AP capitalizes only a proper noun or the start of a complete sentence. In running text, AP capitalizes a complete sentence after a colon, while Chicago does so mainly when multiple sentences follow.
Does capitalization affect SEO?
Not directly. Search engines treat keywords as effectively case-blind, so a title-case headline ranks no differently. Consistency earns its keep on the human side: a site that mixes conventions looks careless, and careless-looking pages collect fewer clicks.
Which major sites use sentence case?
The Guardian's style guide and the UK government's GOV.UK both use sentence case for headlines and page titles. Google's Material Design system prescribes it for buttons and menus. Title case still rules book covers and legal filings.
Write the one sentence
Today, write this sentence and put it where your team will see it: "Our headlines are ___ case." Fill in the blank, run your existing titles through a converter, fix the proper nouns by hand, and the twenty-minute meetings about "with" end this week.