Style Guides

Guides And Explainers

In everyday writing, you usually do not put a movie title in quotes ; instead, italics signal the title in most style guides. Quotes are generally reserved for shorter works lik...

content-strategy

How the date should be written depends on context, audience, and regional conventions. In business, law, healthcare, education, and government, a consistent and unambiguous form...

language-style

In American English, periods and commas almost always go inside closing quotation marks, regardless of whether the quoted material is a full sentence. This style aligns with mod...

language-and-style

Compound words combine two or more words to create a single unit with its own meaning. Understanding the rules for compound words helps writers and editors choose spelling, spac...

music-style

Songs are generally not set in quotation marks; standard style and major style guides recommend italicizing longer musical works like albums and songs. Quotation marks are typic...

writing-and-editing

When deciding whether short stories are quoted or italicized, the key factor is length and format: a standalone published short story is typically italicized, while an untitled...

style-and-formatting

In American English, periods and commas almost always sit inside closing quotation marks, regardless of whether they belong to the quote or the surrounding sentence. In British...

writing-style

Short film titles are generally italicized in writing and in most citation styles, such as MLA and APA, to set them apart as standalone creative works. This standard title forma...

writing

When you reference a film in academic or professional writing, the title must be both recognizable and correctly formatted. The core rule is to italicize feature-length film tit...

grammar-and-style

An apostrophe + s after a last name signals possession, not plurality. Writers sometimes add s to pluralize a surname (e.g., The Johnsons attended ) and mistakenly insert an apo...