Friday, January 8, 2010

Book Titles: Underlined or Italicized?

While we were growing up, we all learned that we should be underlining book titles. This practice originated due to the fact that it was near impossible for typewriters to type in italics. Instead, the author would simply underline the title. As technology began to advance, we began italicizing many types of sources, but books always stayed the same. Well my friends, the MLA has oficially changed the way we should be handling book titles. They should now be italicized instead of underlined.

What are your thoughts? I say the MLA can go take a hike. Especially here, in a place where books and movies based on the book often share a title, this may get very confusing (for example, Stardust the book and Stardust the movie - not cool, MLA). Rest assured, here at Lions and Men, book titles will always be underlined.

Period.

2 comments:

  1. lol make life easy. underline is best ;)

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  2. You know, no matter how many papers I've written, i ALWAYS need to look up the rules for italicizing or underlining books, movies, chapters, etc. Now I'm just going to italicize everything... and then be sad because i finally know that books are SUPPOSED to be underlined :(

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