Italics or quote marks for titles?

1. Titles of long works--books, book-length poems, plays, films, and TV series get italics, which in ms. format you'd probably switch for underlines.

2. Short works, poems, short stories, article titles, and individual episodes of TV series get quotation marks.

3. Titles aren't a copyright problem; they might present other problems, but you can't copyright a title.

Shuvcat said:

What is the preferred way to format the title of a TV show or movie in a manuscript? Should it be,

She turned on "Spongebob Squarepants" or
She turned on Spongebob Squarepants
?

I know there's the whole question of copyright stuff, which I'll worry about later. I just would like to know what the proper format is, if it comes up.
Thanks in advance

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One thing you might consider is looking up the name of the show to make sure you've got the capitalization right. I'm pretty sure the official title of this program is SpongeBob SquarePants, but I'm not sure how big a deal is to get those details right.

I realize you've probably made up an example here, but this is something that comes up frequently during copy editing.

absitinvidia said:

One thing you might consider is looking up the name of the show to make sure you've got the capitalization right. I'm pretty sure the official title of this program is SpongeBob SquarePants, but I'm not sure how big a deal is to get those details right.

I realize you've probably made up an example here, but this is something that comes up frequently during copy editing.

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Unless it's a trade mark (iPod), capitalization of titles is governed by two things:

1. The language of the writer/work

2. The style guide used by the publisher