The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #121393   Message #2649993
Posted By: Marje
06-Jun-09 - 12:22 PM
Thread Name: Typing song title & punctuation-national customs
Subject: RE: Typing song title & punctuation-national customs
It's one of the unwritten rules of pedantry that if you try to point out someone else's error, you'll probably commit a worse blunder yourself in your correction.

It isn't either right or wrong to use initial capitals in song titles, it's a matter of taste and typographic "style". The US tends, oddly enough, to continue some typographical habits that are being abandoned in the UK (Joe's use of full points for "U.S.", above, being another example, and these days it's more of a US preference to use initial capitals. But it's still quite common in the UK to use them, and it's convenient in writing such as we see on this forum, where the caps can be used to identify the song title in running text without having to use quotes. Consider:
The Tinkerman's Daughter is one of my favourites.
The tinkerman's daughter is one of my favourites.
"The tinkerman's daughter" is one of my favourites.

Of those three, the middle one could be ambiguously interpreted, whereas the other two are clear. I think I'd usually go for the initial caps.

Putting in a space before a puncutation mark is just plain wrong, in either country. It happens by accident more than it used to because of cutting/pasting/changing text on screen.

It's normally considered correct (certainly in the UK) to capitalise the start of each line of a song. I was taught at school that there should also be a comma at the end of each line, but I think that habit has long been abandoned. The same probably applies to the use of the full point at the end of a title, and also to the underlining of titles and headings (that's just *so* 20th century!).

The general trend nowadays is towards minimal punctuation. I think this is largely due to the use of computers and electronic typesetting, which can more easily use spacing, fonts, bold type, italics and other tricks to give the desired effect.

Marje