The correct format for film titles when posting

Hmm. We've had this thread before. I use bold.

Krie, you don't switch a light off and on fifty times before leaving a room or wash your hands until they bleed do you mate?

Curious...

If I use both bold and italics (sometimes in the same post), depending on what strikes my fancy, does that make me an asshole?

I don't use any formatting, I don't see the point.

Just annoying.

Pedants realize there is no point, and so continue to aggravate with meaningless rules in a pointless universe, as anything the pedant chooses to do won't necessarily be any more purposeful than anything else; this is supposed to be justification.

Carry on...

Ok Tati. Thanx for clearing that up.

I guess I can live with that.

While I freely admit in my haste to post as I'm usually at work, I'm one of the worst spellers around here, I'd like everyone to spot the irony for ten points...

Oh and for what it's worth Im an italics man when I remember - when I remember that is.

http://chud.com/forum/showthread.php?t=103612

Goddamn I'm good at finding threads.

There is something that warms my heart about people complaining about the degredation of the English language.

Italics.

Titles

Generally, we italicize the titles of things that can stand by themselves. Thus we differentiate between the titles of novels and journals, say, and the titles of poems, short stories, articles, and episodes (for television shows). The titles of these shorter pieces would be surrounded with double quotation marks.

In writing the titles of newspapers, do not italicize the word the, even when it is part of the title (the New York Times), and do not italicize the name of the city in which the newspaper is published unless that name is part of the title: the Hartford Courant, but the London Times.

Other titles that we would italicize include the following:

* Journals and Magazines: Time, U.S. News and World Report, Crazyhorse, Georgia Review
* Plays: Waiting for Godot, Long Day's Journey Into Night
* Long Musical Pieces: Puccini's Madama Butterfly, Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite (but "Waltz of the Flowers"), Schubert's Winterreise (but "Ave Maria"). For musical pieces named by type, number and key — Mozart's Divertimento in D major, Barber's Cello Sonata Op. 6 — we use neither italics nor quotation marks.
* Cinema: Slingblade, Shine, The Invisible Man
* Television and Radio Programs: Dateline, Seinfeld, Fresh Air, Car Talk
* Artworks: the Venus de Milo, Whistler's The Artist's Mother
* Famous Speeches: Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, Washington's Second Inaugural Address (when that is the actual title of the speech)
* Long Poems (that are extensive enough to appear in a book by themselves): Longfellow's Evangeline, Milton's Paradise Lost, Whitman's Leaves of Grass
* Pamphlets: New Developments in AIDS Research

We do not italicize the titles of long sacred works: the Bible, the Koran. Nor do we italicize the titles of books of the Bible: Genesis, Revelation, 1 Corinthians.

When an exclamation mark or question mark is part of a title, make sure that that mark is italicized along with the title,

* My favorite book is Where Have All the Flowers Gone?
* I love Dr. Suess's Oh, the Places You'll Go!

(Do not add an additional period to end such sentences.) If the end mark is not part of the title, but is added to indicate a question or exclamation, do not italicize that mark.

* Did you enjoy Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain?

Names of Vehicles

* Challenger
* Titanic
* Orient Express
* U.S.S. Eisenhower (Don't italicize the U.S.S.)
* H.M.S. Pinafore (Don't italicize the H.M.S. when you're talking about the ship. If you're talking about the light opera, then it's part of the title, H.M.S. Pinafore.)

We don't italicize names of vehicles that are brand names: Ford Explorer, Corvette, Nissan Pathfinder, Boeing 747.

Foreign Words or Phrases

* If a word or phrase has become so widely used and understood that it has become part of the English language — such as the French "bon voyage" or the abbreviation for the latin et cetera, "etc." — we would not italicize it. Often this becomes a matter of private judgment and context. For instance, whether you italicize the Italian sotto voce depends largely on your audience and your subject matter.

Words as Words

Examples:
* The word basically is often unnecessary and should be removed.
* There were four and's and one therefore in that last sentence. (Notice that the apostrophe-s, used to create the plural of the word-as-word and, is not italicized.)
* She defines ambiguity in a positive way, as the ability of a word to mean more than one thing at the same time.

For Emphasis

Note: It is important not to overdo the use of italics to emphasize words. After a while, it loses its effect and the language starts to sound like something out of a comic book.

* I really don't care what you think! (Notice that just about any word in that sentence could have been italicized, depending on how the person said the sentence.)
* These rules do not apply to newspaper writing.

Words as Reproduced Sounds

* Grrr! went the bear. (But you would say "the bear growled" because growled reports the nature of the sound but doesn't try to reproduce it. Thus the bees buzz but go bzzzz and dogs bark woof!)
* His head hit the stairs, kathunk!

Frequently, mimetically produced sounds are also accompanied by exclamation marks.

Fuck that.

Why?

I've always used Bold Italics for film titles, Bold for TV titles and Italics for book titles, newspapers and magazines

Because I like cheap jokes.

...and because I've always used Bold. I tend to dig proper formatting, but since we're in an environment where movies are referenced so often, and in the unique White-on-Black formatting of the boards, I made the choice a while back to stick with bold. The example used in the linked thread demonstrates it perfectly.

Sorry, Phil, but "fuck that" sums it up for me as well. It might be OCD since some of those "rules" drive me bananas and lots of other fruits whenever I see them.

Booooooooooo. You guys are killing the English language. It'll be your fault when we all have to learn Mexican.

Two things fuck me up:

1) when I quote someone, do I adopt his format or continue with my usual?

2) when I want to give emphasis to a regular word in a sentence, do I use the same thing I do for titles, or something else?

I don't like to think about how much time I waste on formatting message-board posts.

If you boil Phil's post down, the only "rule" that comes into play a lot on this board is this: "if it's a stand-alone work, use italics. If it's a part of a whole, use quotes."

If you're not into using formatting on your posts, it'll probably be clear enough. But if you feel the need to set titles off, italics are the standard for movies, books, albums, etc., and quotes are standard for short stories, poems, and songs. No need to reinvent the wheel with all-caps, bold, or what-have-you when there are generally recognized standards in place.

Also, the assigned types of formatting may be arbitrary, but the distinctions that they represent aren't. To wit:

Black Sabbath
Black Sabbath
"Black Sabbath"

These are three entirely different things, and it saves everyone's time if it's clear which one you're writing about. Do you know which represents the song, artist, and album*? Yes? Well, then you understand the rules, even if you don't currently use them when you write.

* Yeah, I know that one could also refer to the film. Sometimes, context is just as necessary as proper formatting.

I capitalize titles of books, films, and albums, and "quote" song titles. You'll just have to follow along, as I am not interested in the correct format.

Why not?

I'm lazy.

.I create my own grammatical rules

Dead or Alive by Takashi Miike

I try and use simple formatting rules to help make my posts clearer. What it boils down to is communication and clarity, understanding.

What's the point of posting something no one is going to understand. A post that no one understands is just words, masturbaition.

Now, the main problem I have with my post is turgid prose. I find it difficult to get across the simplist of ideas. This is probably the single largest factor in my relatively small post count. I can't spell for shit and I don't want to post anything with errors, so each post becomes a process in which I don't always feel like going through.

See, here it goes again. I could have just typed: Format however you want, but, even though this is merely a message board, people are going to judge you on your posts.

In e-mails or facebook comments, I usually go with all caps, because there are no italics, and because I couldn't live with myself if I used quotation marks.

The good thing about bold and caps is that they don't mean anything else. When we use them, it's the same as using italics, and it can't be mistaken for a different effect. I don't really think anyone, even Phil and Dave, care too much when someone bolds or capitalizes a title. At worst, it's just weird, but not confusing.

The real problem is when a format moves to a wrong category of word - italicizing song titles, bolding names of people, quoting film titles, etc. That, I think we all agree, is the worst.

Yeah, definitely.

Although, for the italics-averse, I think it's weird to use all caps or bolding instead of just going with initial caps. Here's why - if the argument is that this stuff is too difficult, time-consuming, etc., it doesn't make any sense to substitute one sort of formatting for another. It takes you no longer to type something in all caps or change the formatting to bold than it does to change the formatting to italics, the generally-accepted format of choice for titles.

So if confusion or time constraints are the problem, why not just go with initial caps and no additional formatting? In most cases, your point will be clear, and your post will look better than it would with a bunch of unnecessary bolding and all-caps (both of which imply emphasis).

Basically if the point is in making yourself as easily understood as possible, I don't see how non-standard formatting is ever better than standard formatting or even no formatting at all.

That's about right. I guess I don't care, exactly, how you use or don't use the accepted formatting. But it's curious to me why someone, once they knew the correct way, would dismiss it. In a forum where the typed word is your only means of expression, I don't understand the decision to not even aim for "correct".

And on the snobby end of things, throwing format to the wind kind of limits your audience, doesn't it? You're writing down.

I like caps. I don't like the way italics look. It's purely aesthetic. That is why I reject the tradition.

Jokes aside, the main page does bold/italic for film titles and that's good enough for me.

I always considered that sort of a carry-over from magazines that emphasize important points. The italics indicate title, the bolding indicates significance. For instance, if CHUD were a site more concerned with celebrity gossip rather than the movies, themselves, perhaps actors and directors would have their names bolded, as well; but they wouldn't be italicized.

I may be completely wrong about the rationale, but that would make sense to me.

Regardless, words in all-caps look ugly. Seriously. It's barely even aesthetics; it's practically science. Just go with initial caps if italics put you off.

Molti's use of all caps makes his posts funnier. (Think about it: Sniper, Sniper, Sniper, or SNIPER?)

Anyway, many newspapers put quotation marks around film titles. AICN uses all caps. We use bold + italics. If a place has a consistent, understandable method, then following that method in that place is something not nearly as bad as "throwing format to the wind."

Now, in the forums, we can't make everyone use the same formatting, and I want to stab when I see that music threads include so many italicized song titles, but when Moltisanti uses caps and Greg David uses bold... it's by far the smallest textual problem we have.

That line of mine was more aimed at the self-proclaimed "fuck that/lazy" camp, I guess.

Yeah, formatting is certainly all about consistency within a certain context. Newspapers stick to quotes for book and movie titles, because it's become a convention of the field; it's a holdover from when underlining and italicizing weren't options in the medium.

But it's kind of like art: you should know what the rules are before you try to break them.

That said, AICN is one of the ugliest major movie sites out there, and this is despite relative consistency in how the writers format movie titles. Not only is the font annoyingly huge, but all of the articles "scream" the movie titles at me. Down with all-caps.

One point against italicizing: it disappears when quoted. Bold survives, whether alone or in concert with the italics. (So does all caps, but if you think it looks bad by itself, you probably can't stand it LIKE THIS.)

And I agree that AICN looks really bad.

I'm generally pretty inconsistent about formatting film titles. Sometimes I just type the name of the film as it is with the first letter of each word capitalized. If I feel like the name of the film should be enhanced in some way, I capitalize all the letters. If it comes across like I'll be naming off several films, I'll try to format them for make it easier on the reader's eyes. It's based on my whims and context, unfortunately.

This, along with the white-on-black thing, is the biggest reason I made the decision to consistently use bold. My "fuck that" comment seriously was a joke. I always use proper italics on movie titles whenever I write a paper or email. Aesthetically and practically bold simply works better here on CHUD.

The point above about emphasis and items of interest is also important. I always like movie titles in bold so that, as I skim, I can notice and possibly skip over comments about movies I haven't yet seen.

I've never liked italics on these boards because the formatting becomes moot if you're quoted (in the quoting post at least).

Doesn't disappear if I take your name off, James. I'm sorry; it's for the greater good.