Titles

Titles


How to Compose a Nice Title for Your Paragraph or Essay

There are a few interesting things to keep in mind when composing titles for your paragraphs and essays in English:

Capitalizing Your Titles

The rules are fairly simple:

Source: Appendix 2 of Great Paragraphs
by Folse, Muchmore-Vokoun, & Solomon.

Artistic Freedom in Your Titles

You actually have a great deal of grammatical freedom in constructing your titles.

For example, titles are often not complete sentences. Sometimes they’re noun phrases. With articles:

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
   by James Joyce

An Introduction to Yoga
   by Annie Besant
Or sometimes without:

Australian Search Party
   by Charles Henry Eden
Copyright Basics
   US Copyright Office
Sometimes prepositional phrases are used:

After the Storm
   by T. S. Arthur
Beyond Good and Evil
   by Friedrich Nietzsche
Or just the names of people.

These can be real people:

David Crockett
   by John S. C. Abbott
Or fictional:

Hedda Gabler
   by Henrik Ibsen
Barry Lyndon
   by William Makepeace Thackeray
Androcles and the Lion
   by G. B. Shaw
...and sometimes noun phrases that indicate a person:

Who Spoke Next
   by Eliza Lee Follen
They can also be one or more abstract ideas:

Physics and Politics
   by Walter Bagehot
Culture and Anarchy
   by Matthew Arnold
First and Last Things
   by H. G. Wells
How about a question?:

Can Such Things Be?
   by Ambrose Bierce
They might be poetic "coinages" (made-up words) or may allude (refer) to classic writings:

Watersprings
   by Arthur Christopher Benson
Few Figs from Thistles
   by Edna St. Vincent Millay