Title Case and Sentence Case Capitalization in APA Style
by Chelsea Lee
APA Style has two capitalization methods that are used in different contexts throughout a paper: title case and sentence case (see Publication Manual section 4.15). APA’s title case refers to a capitalization style in which most words are capitalized, and sentence case refers to a capitalization style in which most words are lowercased. In both cases, proper nouns and certain other types of words are always capitalized. Below are guidelines for when and how to use each case in an APA Style paper.
Title Case
Title case is used to capitalize the following types of titles and headings in APA Style:
- Titles of references (e.g., book titles, article titles) when they appear in the text of a paper,
- Titles of inventories or tests,
- Headings at Levels 1 and 2,
- The title of your own paper and of named sections within it (e.g., the Discussion section), and
- Titles of periodicals—journals, magazines, or newspapers—which are also italicized (e.g., Journal of Counseling Psychology, The New York Times).
Here are directions for implementing APA’s title case:
- Capitalize the first word of the title/heading and of any subtitle/subheading;
- Capitalize all “major” words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and pronouns) in the title/heading, including the second part of hyphenated major words (e.g., Self-Report not Self-report); and
- Capitalize all words of four letters or more.
This boils down to using lowercase only for “minor” words of three letters or fewer, namely, for conjunctions (words like and, or, nor, and but), articles (the words a, an, and the), and prepositions (words like as, at, by, for, in, of, on, per, and to), as long as they aren’t the first word in a title or subtitle. You can see examples of title case in our post on reference titles.
Sentence Case
Sentence case, on the other hand, is a capitalization style that mainly uses lowercase letters. Sentence case is used in a few different contexts in APA Style, including for the following:
- The titles of references when they appear in reference list entries and
- Headings at Levels 3, 4, and 5
Here are directions for implementing sentence case in APA Style in these two contexts:
- Capitalize the first word of the title/heading and of any subtitle/subheading;
- Capitalize any proper nouns and certain other types of words; and
- Use lowercase for everything else.
Additionally, as you might suspect given its name, sentence case is used in regular sentences in the text of a paper. In a typical sentence, the first word is always capitalized, and the first word after a colon is also capitalized when what follows the colon is an independent clause.
You can see examples of sentence case in our reference titles post.
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