Grammar Rules for Song Titles

• Whether you are writing a paper about music and need to know how to properly reference a song title, or you are writing a song yourself and want to make the title look grammatically correct, there are a few conventions to follow.

Quotation Marks

• While many writers are tempted to put song titles in italics or underline them, the only appropriate way to refer to a song title in writing is in quotes. Use double, never single, quotations. For example, you'd refer to the song you hear every birthday like this: "The Birthday Song." Place quotes around article titles, one-act plays, short stories, short poems and chapter titles, too. If the song is so long that it is more of an extended musical composition, then you can put the title in italics or underline it instead.

Title Case

• When writing about song titles, you need to put them in "title case." That means you should capitalize most of the first letters in each word of the title, except for articles such as "a" or "the," prepositions fewer than five letters long such as "to" or "at," and conjunctions such as "and" and "but." Always capitalize the first word and the last word in the title, regardless of whether it's an article, short preposition or a conjunction. However, if you are writing the song title yourself, you are allowed to make an artistic choice to eschew title case completely and leave the title in all lowercase letters. If you are referring to a song title that the artist left uncapitalized, write it that way.

Other Grammar Rules

• Unless you're trying to use grammar and spelling mistakes in the song title on purpose, you should always follow normal grammar rules when conceiving your song title. You don't, however, need to worry about creating a complete sentence. Most song titles are sentence fragments. When writing your song title in a paper, place punctuation inside the quotes. For example: On my birthday, I always hear "The Birthday Song." Otherwise, you'll notice most song titles don't usually contain punctuation, except for the parenthesis and the occasional comma.