There are things I do on this blog that often matter only to me. For example, I've explained why I defy convention when it comes to how I use ellipses or how I used to use em dashes (back when I wrote em dashes as a double hyphen, i.e., before figuring out em dashes on both Mac and PC). Ellipses are normally supposed to be three or four periods* with spaces in front and behind each of them:
She gave Brent a smile . . . then pulled the trigger.
What I normally do is:
She gave Brent a smile... then pulled the trigger.
This is to avoid the weird, "non-breaking" property that ellipses possess on certain platforms like Blogger. If I didn't put a space after the ellipsis in my version of the sentence, the phrase smile...then would be treated as a single, long word, and at the end of a line, if that "word" was too long, the whole thing would spill over to the next line instead of just the word then. That's why I put the space after the ellipsis. I also write my ellipses the way I do (... , not . . . ) because the "space between every period" convention isn't universally agreed upon. In fact, some word processors, when you type out three periods, will automatically group those three periods together tightly into a single ellipsis "character." Try it out sometime on your word processor: type an ellipsis, then see how many times you have to hit the delete key to erase it. If it's just once, the ellipsis has been changed into a single character. If it's three or four times, then your word processor is a libertarian when it comes to punctuation.
Back when I used to make my em dashes with two hyphens (--), I would put a space after the two hyphens for the same reason: Blogger is weird that way. Now, of course, and for many years, I know how to make proper em dashes (—, for dramatic pauses, etc.), and I no longer insert spaces anywhere. On a Mac, it's a simultaneous keystroke combination: shift-option-hyphen. On a Windows PC, you hold down the alt key and type 0151.
my old way: Frances gripped the heavy barbell-- with her crotch.
my "new" way (for years now): Frances gripped the heavy barbell—with her crotch.
So with ellipses (normally . . . ), I have my quirky, maybe-acceptable way of handling them. And for em dashes (—), I changed how I handle them.
For the longest time, I've also had my own convention for handling movie titles: I surround them with quotation marks. Many news and magazine articles also reflect this convention (see here; I'm not hallucinating this). Technically, the title of any completed creative work should be italicized. Movies, once they're released, are completed creative works. A book of poetry, once published, has a title (Leaves of Grass), but each poem in that collection is cited with quotation marks around the poem's title (a work within a work, like "Song of Myself"). The same would be true for a compendium of short stories, like Stephen King's Four Past Midnight (the collection title) and "The Langoliers" (a story within that collection).
Starting with my recent review of The Last Samurai, I finally decided to bow to proper convention and italicize movie titles. Did you notice? Look at my reviews for The Fall Guy and Nosferatu. The major reason for this is the movie-review book I've been working on: Part of my editing involves stripping away the quotation marks and italicizing all the titles I find. It's a pain in the ass. So as an investment in the future, I'm bowing to convention and italicizing movie titles from now on.
I lose something, though, when I do this: I lose the ability to distinguish between a book title and a movie title, as when I wrote this sentence in my Nosferatu review:
One theme of the movie is about how science fails in the face of pure evil, a theme also touched on in both the novel The Exorcist and the movie "The Exorcist."
With everything now italicized, that distinction will be lost, which is a bit sad. On the other hand, I'll have one less distinction to worry about for future reviews.
But sad or not, I'm now sticking with italics for all titles of completed creative works. Come to think of it, I watched the English-dubbed version of Princess Mononoke again over the weekend—a film I hadn't watched in years. So a review for that will be coming down the pipe this week. Another chance for you to notice my newly italicized movie titles.
__________
*Use three periods for sentence fragments and four periods for complete sentences.
I didn't notice, to be honest, probably because I've italicized film titles for a while now, so it just seemed normal. I also don't really care that much about it, so I don't think your previous method bothered me too much.
ReplyDeleteI've never thought of the difference between italics and quotes for titles as "completed works" versus... well, "uncompleted works"? "Incomplete works"? Do you not consider "Song of Myself" a complete work? Poems and short stories can be published in magazines, where they are complete works unto themselves. Maybe I'm thinking of "completed" in a different sense. Anyway, I've always just thought of it as "long" versus "short." A bit oversimplified, perhaps, but it works.
As for the ellipsis and the em-dash, OpenOffice (which is what I use to write up my stuff) converts both by default, I believe. That is, three periods become a single ellipsis character and two dashes become a single em-dash. No need for ALTing anything. Incidentally, a single hyphen surrounded by spaces on both sides automatically converst into an en-dash in OO. You can turn these off in the settings, but I leave them on; I've just gotten so used to the convenience.
For me, "complete" is shorthand for "complete in and of itself." So a poem in a collection is part of a greater whole; the same goes for a titled chapter in a book or an episode of a TV show. Even if "Song of Myself" were to appear alone in a magazine, it would still be part of that magazine. The question is, then, what to do if I ever come across "Song of Myself" as its own little pamphlet....
DeleteAnother sense of "complete" to use as a guideline is "completed." For some people, you don't italicize magazine titles because the magazine, in churning out issues, is still an ongoing work. Time, not Time; Newsweek, not Newsweek. I admit I'm not absolutely consistent when it comes to magazine titles, but when I remember to, I generally don't italicize them.
As for the long/short distinction: I've seen that wisdom before, and I guess it works as a vague rule of thumb, but there's always the "relative to what?" question. A ten-minute short film and a three-hour epic both have italicized titles because... relative to the lifespan of the cosmos, they're both short films? I'm being flippant, but you get my meaning.
re: ellipsis and em dash
You can turn these off in the settings, but I leave them on; I've just gotten so used to the convenience.
Ah. That explains why I see so many double hyphens in your comments (see here, here, and here, for example, in recent comments): Blogger, lacking most nifty features, apparently doesn't make such conversions.
Yeah, we definitely have different understandings of the word "complete," because I do consider "Song of Myself" to be "complete in and of itself." The fact that it appears in a collection is not really inherent to the thing itself but more just an aspect of a particular publication style (as you point out with your pamphlet example). But, hey, if that works for you, that's all the matters.
DeleteAlso, I've never heard of the rule of not italicizing magazine titles (or newspaper titles, following the same logic). Both Chicago and MLA, for example, say italicize. I thought it might be a journalistic thing versus an academic thing, but I looked up AP and it says italicize as well. Have you seen this in a different style guide? Enquiring minds want to know.
Lastly, yep, that's why you see the double hyphens in my comments--and why you will continue to see them. Old habits die hard (if at all).
There seems to be a lot of confusion in these guides re: how to treat titles. Here's what Grammarbook.com has to say, quoting CMOS:
DeleteWhen quoted in text or listed in a bibliography, titles of books, journals, plays, and other freestanding works are italicized; titles of articles, chapters, and other shorter works are set in roman and enclosed in quotation marks.
So on the one hand, "freestanding" is a criterion for italicization, similar to my standard of a self-complete work ("complete in and of itself"). But this is contrasted with "shorter works," which again brings up the "relative to what?" question I'd mentioned earlier. So the CMOS contrast is between "freestanding" and "shorter," which doesn't feel like a logical contrast to me.
Grammarly.com makes a similarly strange contrast: it refers to longer/shorter works as well as to "other big, standalone, or complete bodies of work like newspapers, symphonies, or publications." So again, there's "standalone or complete" as a standard, but there's also "big." Pick a lane, dammit!
I think we all need to get our stories straight, again keeping in mind that a ten-minute short film and a three-hour epic both have their titles italicized. I would suggest throwing out long/short or big/little as standards and sticking with standalone/freestanding/complete as the criterion for italics.
As to the question of magazine titles, well, I couldn't find any authorities to back up my old insight from years ago, but several sources say not to italicize or capitalize the word "magazine" unless it's part of the magazine's title. Since I'm inconsistent on the matter, anyway, it's no big deal to bow to current convention. In my defense, though, I'll note that you don't have to go far to see plenty of online examples of non-italicization of magazine titles: here, here, here, here, and here, for example.
I think it's safe to say that titles and other bibliographical information are an eternal source of agita. I try not to think too hard about it, because when you do that (as we are doing here), it stops making sense pretty quickly. To be honest, my knowledge of how to handle titles is more about categorization (that is, I have a mental list of which type of titles should be italicized and which type of titles should be in quotes); the "long/short" or "big/little" thing is just a shorthand. The truth, though, is that I rarely give much thought to the logic of the distinction and just concern myself with what I am supposed to do in the particular case I am faced with. Usually we're talking about an academic bibliography, and I want to spend as little brain power on that as possible. I figure as long as it's consistent (and consistent with whatever style is demanded), the justification doesn't matter much.
DeleteIronic that the NYT doesn't italicize magazine/newspaper titles, despite the fact that most style guides say that the title of the NYT should be italicized! They do have some quirky style guidelines, though (as does The New Yorker).
Just goes to show that none of this actually "makes sense." It's really just all about arbitrary decisions that people have decided to go along with. Sure, style guides will try to provide some ex post facto justification for their choice, but that's a justification, not a reason. All I know is that if I referred to a magazine or newspaper in an academic paper and didn't italicize the title in the bibliography, I would get dinged for that by the copy editor. Let's not even start on online materials, like how to cite YT videos. Gah. I hate doing bibliographies.
When I was in grad school, our guide was a style manual by Kate Turabian, which was essentially a condensed version of CMOS. Like you, I preferred to expend as little brainpower as possible on bibliographies and works-cited lists.
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