: How should I capitalise headlines for professional Web writing? (Sentence case vs title case) I'm often uncertain about how I should capitalise headlines for professional writing on the Web. The

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Headlines, except in the New York Times, should be sentence case.

See what I did? I gave my opinion, cause there is no right answer, but also alluded to the fact that it's a matter of style and consistency.

Each site must determine what to use, and stick with it consistently. There might be different styles for main heads and subheads. There might be rules about verb tense, omitted words, abbreviations. There should be a complete, written rationale for how the headlines should look and sound. If you don't know what the style is, then I'd use sentence case anyway, because title case is really only for titles of entire works (books, songs, plays, movies) and technical papers, not most web headlines.

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The case of your headings doesn't matter as long as you are consistent in the way you head them.

As you already supposed, you might want to put formal blog posts in title case and casual posts in sentence case. Yet, because a blog is sort of a book-in-serial, I would make a decision for all posts and stand by it.

As mentioned above, it's also good practice to write your own manual of style. It will help you maintain consistency in all writing. For instance U.S. or US? Internet or internet? There really is no right or wrong (although the AP might disagree) as long as you are consistent.

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I work with an organization that has an official manual of style regarding the web. They strictly enforce sentence case, even in buttons on a web application "Save thing" instead of the more normal "Save Thing."

It comes down to style and standards. It's more important, in my opinion, to be consistent.

For myself, I tend to slow down and read all of the capitalized words in the second example. I speed read a lot of things, and so the Sentence Case doesn't optimize the sentence for my speed consumption. Non-capitalized words I can pretty much ignore. It's not scientific, but it's one opinion.

I think for a headline, you want people to stop and notice, in which case I want Title Case. You mention it's more aggressive, but if it's a headline, you want to be aggressive. You usually want to yell "Hey! Over here!" After the user has committed to reading it, then it's best to switch (as you suggest). The user is now committed, so slow everything down.

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