Sentence Case vs Title Case: Which Should You Use?

The difference at a glance

Take the headline "how to choose a new laptop for school". In sentence case it reads "How to choose a new laptop for school": only the first word has a capital letter, as in a normal sentence. In title case it reads "How to Choose a New Laptop for School" with a capital letter on the main words and lowercase on small words such as to, a and for.

Proper nouns keep their capitals in both styles. "Why Paris is better in spring" in sentence case is "Why Paris is better in spring", with Paris capitalized because it is a name. A sentence case headline therefore has fewer capital letters, and the capitals that remain mean something: the start of a sentence or a name.

Title case, by contrast, uses capital letters for emphasis and for structure. It marks the headline visually as a title and makes it look more formal. The cost is that every title needs a decision about which words are small.

Where title case is the norm

Title case is the traditional choice for the titles of books, films, albums and newspaper headlines in the United States. Many US newspapers and magazines use it for headlines, and so do many book publishers on covers and title pages. Academic style guides use title case for the titles of works mentioned in the text, and for section headings in several styles: APA, for example, uses title case for all five of its heading levels.

Marketing teams often choose title case for page titles, buttons and product names because it looks formal and important. Event names, course names and job titles are other common cases. Whenever the text is a name, a work or a formal heading, title case is a safe default.

Where sentence case is the norm

Sentence case is standard in the style guides of many technology companies. Microsoft's writing style guide asks for sentence-style capitalization in headings and titles, and Google's developer documentation style guide does the same. The reasoning is that sentence case is easier to read and easier to write, and that it works better in a user interface where short phrases appear on buttons, menus and labels.

Newspapers outside the United States often use sentence case for headlines, and many British papers follow ordinary sentence capitalization. The AP Stylebook itself asks for sentence-style capitalization in news headlines. In reference lists, APA uses sentence case for the titles of articles, books and web pages, even though the same titles are written in title case in the text. This is a common cause of confusion for students.

Readability and tone

There is some evidence and a lot of opinion on readability. Lowercase letters have distinctive shapes, and readers use these shapes to recognize words, which is commonly given as a reason why long stretches of capital letters read more slowly. Title case adds capital letters in the middle of a line, but only on the first letter of each word, so the effect is small. Sentence case looks calmer and more conversational, while title case looks more formal.

Tone is a practical argument. A brand that wants to sound friendly and plain often chooses sentence case. A brand that wants to sound institutional or traditional often chooses title case. Neither style is better for search engines: Google does not treat words differently depending on their capitalization, and its help pages note that searches are not case sensitive.

Consistency matters more than the choice

The most visible mistake is mixing the two styles. A navigation bar with "About Us" next to "Contact us" looks careless. The same is true in a table of contents, a slide deck or a list of buttons. Decide on one style for each kind of text and write the rule down in a short style note.

A simple division works for many sites: title case for the names of products, plans and pages that act as proper names, and sentence case for headings, buttons and descriptions. Whatever you choose, apply it everywhere, including meta titles, social media previews and email subject lines.

How to convert between the two

Converting from title case to sentence case is easy to automate: lowercase everything, then capitalize the first letter of each sentence. The converter on this page does exactly this. The weakness is that proper nouns, names, acronyms and brand names are lowercased as well, so you must restore Paris, NASA and iPhone by hand.

Converting from sentence case to title case is a more demanding task because the tool must decide which words are small. Choose the style that matches your guide, and let the converter lowercase the text, capitalize the major words and keep the small ones in lowercase. Then check names and acronyms once more.

A quick decision guide

Use title case for the titles of books, films and articles that you mention in text, for formal headings in styles that require it and for names of products and events. Use sentence case for interface text, documentation, email subject lines that should feel personal, and any place where your style guide asks for it.

If nobody has told you what to use, pick sentence case for new projects: it needs fewer decisions and fewer corrections. If you inherit an existing site, follow what is there. A consistent site in the less fashionable style is better than an inconsistent one.