Some writers find capitalizing titles of literary works to be tricky. When do you capitalize the titles of literary works? All the time. This is a basic grammar rule. Unless, of course, the writer has specifically written the title of his literary work in lower case. Many of today’s writers do not observe proper capitalization anymore. And, this is often not due to oversight alone. Good writers, however, are more conscious of this often committed mistake. Here’s a quick rundown on capitalization rules that every writer should follow, whether in the titles of literary works or in other written work.

Generally, you have to capitalize the following properly in headlines:

Nouns – car, mobile phone, desktop computer

Pronouns – we, they, it

Verbs – walk, drink, talk

Adjectives – huge, pretty, colorful

Adverbs – incredibly, often, again

Subordinators – while, whereas, unless

In addition to the nouns, verbs, adjectives or other terms that entail interest, we also need to capitalize the first and last word of our title.

Coordinators or coordinating conjunctions like “a, an, the, by, for, and the like” should remain as lowercase.

Other writers do capitalize the prepositions. These are words like “from, with, and atop;” however, other prepositions have to be in lowercase like “in spite of, in respect to, and next to.”

In technical titles, writers usually employ a type of sentence format in which the first words in the header and sub head are capitalized while the rest of the succeeding words are kept in lowercase. An example of this is: “Restoring your mobile phone: Five easy steps.”

Abbreviations are shortcuts in the literary world. Some say that we don’t need to have them with all capital letters but some need to be capitalized but with a certain guideline that is to be followed:

Latin abbreviations – these are abbreviations that have full stops or periods on the end. Shortcuts such as a.m. (before midday), et al. (and others or co-workers), and etc. (and the rest) don’t need to be in capital letters but have full stop or period.

Acronyms – this is the abbreviation formed from the first letter of each word like OEM, FAQ, and JPEG are common in the technology editorials. These don’t have periods in between them. All letters are capitalized.

Name prefixes – are abbreviations added before the name. They are capitalized then ended with a period. Examples are Dr. (Doctor) and Engr. (Engineer)

Informal abbreviations – these are words that are found in SMS or short messaging services and in social media like Twitter. Examples are lol (laugh out loud) and rofl (rolling on the floor laughing). However, one should avoid using these kinds of words in literary writing.

Also, the common mistake that some writers make is to capitalize the whole word or words of their title, like for example “ELECTRIC FAN.” Do not do this but instead just write it only as “Electric Fan.”

In capitalizing your headlines, it will still depend on the particular words and how they are to be used by the writer or publicist.