Nusing commas with book titles

If you are taking the sat or act and want the simplified version that applies to virtually all commas with names titles questions on those exams, click here. There are more usages of a comma, for example, how adding or removing comma before and after a name changes the meaning of the sentence. Do you use a comma after a book title in a sentence. Ive recently received a handful of questions asking for clarification about rule governing the use of commas with names and titles. When you are using a book title in a sentence you usually put quotation marks, around and commas before and after it but in elementary school you are taught underline all titles. How do i write out the list so as to be clear about which commas are part of the titles and which are separating items in a list. For example, i want to list four book titles in a single sentence, but two of the books have commas in the titles. Many people learn that a comma should be placed before a name or title, but that is not entirely true. In the following example, commas are used to set off the by phrase because the phrase is not integral to the meaning of the sentence life after life, by kate atkinson, won several book awards if you remove the phrase, the meaning is the same. Some that come to mind are life, the universe and everything. However, many current style manuals recommend italicizing book titles and magazine names impossible to do on a typewriter and using quotation marks around articles.

Beware of using title case in microsoft word, as it will capitalize every single word in a title. Before computers, we used typewriters to underline book titles, and we placed quotation marks around article titles. Should commas be used around by and an authors name after. Italics and underlining are used today to emphasize titles of works such as books, poems, short stories, and articles. Normally there might be a slight pause at the commas when reading the sentence, but a slight pause when reading is not a reason to introduce a comma when the grammar does not require it the book title, book, is not parenthetical content in your sentence. Different style guides have different standards for italics and underlining titles, so youll need to learn which to use. Should commas be used around by and an authors name after a title it depends. Of all the comma rules tested on the sat and act, this is probably the subtlest. But if you are referencing parts of a book, such as book chapters, or only part of the title, then use quotation marks.

The good news is that questions testing this rule dont show up very often. The correct way to use commas with names and titles. Using quotation marks in titles punctuation khan academy. How to reference books and articles in text grammar and. It is recommended that you do not place italics or quotation marks around the titles if they are book titles. Use a pair of single quotation marks to enclose a title, direct quotation, or piece of dialogue that appears within another quotation. We use commas while combining multiple phrases in one sentence or writing about different items in a list. Punctuation is the collection of squiggles, dots, and lines that we use to separate sentences and their parts. Do you use a comma before a title of a book in a sentence. As a general rule, dont put quotation marks around the titles of books, newspapers, films, or magazines.