Knowing whether to underline or italicize book titles is a fundamental skill for anyone who writes, from students crafting essays to professionals drafting reports. But the short answer in modern writing is that you should italicize book titles. Worth adding: underlining is largely considered an outdated practice, a relic of the typewriter era when italics were not an available font option. Still, the specific rules can shift depending on the style guide you are following—such as MLA, APA, or Chicago—and the medium in which you are publishing. Mastering these nuances ensures your work looks polished, professional, and credible Worth knowing..
This changes depending on context. Keep that in mind.
The General Rule: Italicize for Standalone Works
The standard convention across almost all modern style guides is to use italics for the titles of major, standalone works. A book is the quintessential example of a standalone work. Think about it: it is a complete, independent entity, not a smaller piece living inside a larger container. That's why, when you reference To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, or Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind in the body of your text, the titles should appear in italics But it adds up..
Not obvious, but once you see it — you'll see it everywhere.
This rule extends beyond just novels and non-fiction books. It applies to any complete, published work that stands alone. This category includes:
- Full-length plays (e.g., Hamlet, A Streetcar Named Desire)
- Long poems published as books (e.g., The Odyssey, The Waste Land)
- Newspapers and magazines (e.g., The New York Times, National Geographic)
- Academic journals (e.g., Journal of Modern History)
- Films and TV series (e.g., The Godfather, Breaking Bad)
- Music albums (e.g., Thriller, Rumours)
- Works of visual art (e.g., The Starry Night, Mona Lisa)
Using italics signals to the reader immediately: This is the title of a major, independent work. It creates a visual hierarchy that distinguishes the title from the surrounding sentence structure And it works..
Why We Stopped Underlining: A Historical Perspective
To understand why underlining persists in some classrooms or older documents, we have to look at the history of writing technology. Before the widespread adoption of personal computers and word processors, writers relied on typewriters or handwriting. Standard typewriters had a single font face—usually a monospaced Courier or Pica type—and lacked the mechanical ability to slant characters into italics.
In that environment, underlining was the standard manuscript notation for italics. In real terms, it was an instruction to the typesetter at the printing press: "Set this text in italics. " When students turned in typed term papers in the 1980s or early 1990s, underlining book titles was not a stylistic choice; it was a technical necessity because the machine physically could not produce italic characters.
Today, virtually every writing platform—Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Scrivener, even basic text editors—supports italics. Because of that, because the technical limitation no longer exists, the convention has reverted to the typographic standard: actual italics. That's why if you underline a book title in a modern Word document, it looks like a hyperlink or a formatting error, not a title. Most contemporary style guides explicitly advise against underlining in final manuscripts.
The Exception: Handwriting and Specific Platforms
There is one significant scenario where underlining remains the correct choice: handwriting. When you are writing by hand—whether taking an in-class exam, writing in a journal, or drafting a letter—producing legible, distinct italics by hand is difficult and often looks like messy cursive. That said, in handwritten work, underlining the title of a book is the standard, accepted method for indicating that the words represent a title. It provides clear visual separation that handwritten "slanting" often fails to achieve.
Additionally, some specific digital platforms or legacy systems may not support rich text formatting (like plain text .txt files, certain coding environments, or very old forum software). In those rare cases, a common workaround is to use asterisks or underscores around the title (e.g., *The Hobbit* or _The Hobbit_) to denote where italics would go, but this is a markup convention, not a formal citation style Practical, not theoretical..
Quotation Marks vs. Italics: The "Container" Logic
One of the most common sources of confusion is knowing when to use italics versus "quotation marks.So " The distinction relies on the concept of "containers" or the "whole vs. part" relationship.
- Use Italics for the WHOLE (The Container): The book itself, the journal, the album, the movie, the TV series, the newspaper.
- Use Quotation Marks for the PART (The Content Inside): A chapter in a book, an article in a journal, a song on an album, a scene in a movie, an episode of a TV series, a poem in a collection, a short story in an anthology.
Examples of the Whole vs. Part Rule
| Italicize (The Whole/Container) | Quotation Marks (The Part) |
|---|---|
| Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Book) | "The Boy Who Lived" (Chapter) |
| The New Yorker (Magazine) | "The Case for Reparations" (Article) |
| Abbey Road (Album) | "Come Together" (Song) |
| The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Film) | "The Council of Elrond" (Scene/Chapter) |
| Stranger Things (TV Series) | "Chapter One: The Vanishing of Will Byers" (Episode) |
| Leaves of Grass (Poetry Collection) | "Song of Myself" (Individual Poem) |
This logic holds true across MLA, APA, and Chicago styles. In practice, if you can ask "What larger work is this piece a part of? " and the answer is a book, journal, or album, the larger work gets italics and the smaller piece gets quotation marks.
Style Guide Specifics: MLA, APA, and Chicago
While the core rule (italicize books) is universal, the major academic style guides have slight variations in how they handle capitalization and specific edge cases Not complicated — just consistent..
MLA Style (Modern Language Association)
- Standard: Italicize book titles.
- Capitalization: Use title case (capitalize the first word, the last word, and all principal words—nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and subordinating conjunctions). Do not capitalize articles (a, an, the), prepositions (in, on, at), or coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or) unless they are the first or last word.
- Subtitles: Separate with a colon and a space. Example: The Elements of Style: A Guide to Writing Well.
- Series Titles: If a book is part of a series but has its own distinct title, italicize the book title. The series name is usually not italicized (or styled per specific publisher preference), but often the book title stands alone. Example: The Two Towers (part of The Lord of the Rings series).
APA Style (American Psychological Association)
- Standard: Italicize book titles.
- Capitalization (Reference List): Use sentence case. Capitalize only the first word of the title, the first word of the subtitle, and proper nouns. Example: The psychology of learning: An introduction.
