Italics or Quotes? The 'Big vs. Small' Rule That Saves Your Grade

Formatting titles is one of those annoying little rules nobody bothers to memorize until they lose five points on a final paper.

You write a brilliant paragraph about a movie, and then you just freeze at the keyboard. Do I underline it? Italicize it? Put quotes around it? If you guess wrong, the whole paper suddenly looks sloppy to whoever is grading it.

Luckily, there is a ridiculously simple trick to this. Once you learn the "big vs. small" rule, you will never have to Google it again.

The Rule of Thumb

Think about the size of the thing you're writing about.

Is it a massive, standalone piece of work? Or is it a tiny piece tucked inside something else?

• Big things get italics.

• Small things get quotation marks.

That's literally it.

The Big Stuff (Italics)

Use italics for the big, heavy things. Stuff you could physically hold in your hand as a complete package.

• Books (The Hunger Games)

• Movies (Inception)

• Music Albums (1989)

• Newspapers and Magazines (The New York Times)

• TV Shows (Breaking Bad)

(Side note: If you are writing an in-class essay with a pen, you can't exactly write in italics. Just underline these instead!)

The Small Stuff (Quotation Marks)

Use quotation marks for the smaller pieces that live inside those bigger works.

• A specific chapter inside a book ("The Boy Who Lived")

• A single song on an album ("Blank Space")

• An article inside a magazine ("How to Study Better")

• One specific episode of a TV show ("The Pilot")

Seeing It in Action

Sometimes you need to use both in the exact same sentence.

Check this out: My absolute favorite song is "Smells Like Teen Spirit" from the album Nevermind.

See how perfectly that works? The small piece is in quotes, and the big piece holding it is in italics.

Just keep "big vs. small" in your head, and your formatting will be completely bulletproof.