Titles in Quotation Marks
How to punctuate a short work's title, including what happens when it meets other punctuation.
Short works — articles, chapters, songs, episodes, short stories, most poems, conference papers, unpublished manuscripts — take quotation marks around their titles. The marks are part of the citation apparatus, not decoration, and they are set in the same style (double in US usage, single in much British usage) as ordinary quotations in the document.
Two mechanical rules cause most errors. First, in American style, a comma or period at the end of a title goes inside the closing mark: 'I reread "Araby," then slept.' Second, a title that already contains a quotation nests inward: "On Hemingway's ‘Hills Like White Elephants’" in US style, with the inner pair switched to single marks.
A question mark or exclamation point that belongs to the title stays inside the marks, and no additional comma or period is added after it in most styles: 'She assigned "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" for Tuesday.' If the question is yours rather than the title's, the mark goes outside.
Common mistake: capitalising the title in sentence case when the house style requires title case, or leaving the article's subtitle out. Quotation marks do not exempt a title from normal capitalisation rules.
“Nagel's "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" appeared in The Philosophical Review.”
Keep reading the glossary
Italics for whole, self-contained works; quotation marks for parts contained within them.
A quotation inside another quotation, distinguished by alternating single and double marks.
The rule — differing on either side of the Atlantic — for where the comma and period sit relative to a closing quotation mark.
The punctuation that signals direct speech or a quoted phrase — single or double, depending on locale.