Quotes or Italics?

I’m really inconsistent in my use of quotation marks or italics when I mention the titles of TV shows, books, movies and theater productions in this blog. I use quotation marks a lot (including in my previous post), but I think italics look cleaner. (I never use ALL CAPS, because it looks like shouting.)

Quotation marks are a pain when creating hyperlinks to works of art. Sometimes a period or comma comes before the closing quotation mark, but I don’t like including punctuation in hyperlinks. For instance, if, in this sentence, I link to “Guys and Dolls,” there’s a quote in that there hyperlink. I don’t like that.

And apparently I should be using italics more often than I do.

I don’t really come across movie, theater, or TV show titles in my day job as an editor, so I wasn’t clear on this.

Anyway, from now on I’ll try to use italics when referring to most titles.

Yay!

5 thoughts on “Quotes or Italics?

  1. P.S. If you want to be all “semantic web,” you can use the cite tag for titles (instead of em or i); in any case, most browsers display cite as italic anyway.

  2. It’s funny, when I started my blog I used quote marks but I didn’t like how it looked, so I switched to italics a few months later and I’ve been using them very happily ever since.

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