As you can see by looking at the title to this entry, things are changing.
- The old rule of ending your titles with a period or other form of punctuation is out. Starting today, your entry titles should not have any end punctuation at all, unless—and this is less desirable—they end with a question mark or exclamation point.
- Please capitalize the first letter of the first word of the title. If you use any exclamations or interjections followed by punctuation, capitalize the start of the word after it. All other words in the title should be lowercase, excepting proper nouns, of course.
- We’re quickly developing a library of entries, so it’s important that our titles are relevant and descriptive. We’re up to 96 entries so far, and it’s going to be hard to sort out and edit those if we can’t look at the list and have some idea of what title corresponds with which entry.
- Of course, our titles can (and should) be fun, too. Think of your entry titles as headlines. They need to describe the story and also catch the reader’s attention.
- Optimally, titles will be a single statement or phrase. “Revised guidelines for entry titles,” “How I spent my New Year’s Eve,” or “I got stabbed in the shoulder by a swordfish-wielding mariner” are all acceptable, as long as they’re relevant to the entry.
Of course, you’ll see me editing titles that don’t fit these guidelines, which are by no means exhaustive.
