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!
What if instead you were to have done this: “Guys and Dolls,”
Eh. That looks too busy to me.
Yay, italics. I feel like in my head I have a style guide for my blog, but one of these days I’ll be geeky enough to write it down. ;-)
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.
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.