Can you guess one of the most popular questions regarding writing essays in college? Most often, students ask about citations and quotes because the formatting requirements for citations are unreasonably strict and undoubtedly counterintuitive. Let’s discuss one exciting aspect of the vivid and entangled quotation art: the guidelines for including song titles in quotes in your academic paper. It is relatively simple, but (oh, there is always a “but”) there are some vital nuances you probably would want to know.
✅ AI Essay Writer ✅ AI Detector ✅ Plagchecker ✅ Paraphraser
✅ Summarizer ✅ Citation Generator
How to Punctuate Song Titles
Long story short: you should always surround your music title with quotes. That is pretty much it: if you want to cite music composition in your academic paper, you should do it the same as in the examples below.
Example: Of all the country songs released in 2000, the title track from Toby Keith’s How Do You Like Me Now? had the most airplay. “Country Comes to Town” and “You Shouldn’t Kiss Me Like That” are two other beloved tracks from the same album.
As you can see, “Country Comes to Town” and “You Shouldn’t Kiss Me Like That” are song titles that are properly formatted by putting quotation marks around them. Sounds fairly simple, right? Well, there is a little bit more to it.
To speed up the citation process, consider giving a chance to our free generator!
Confused When Referencing? Try our Free Citation Generator
How to Write Song Titles: Exceptions
There is also an italic font in the example above, which is not a mistake. You should put quotation marks around song titles, but it is common practice to highlight the album names with italics. So, “How Do You Like Me Now?” is an album title, and it should be written in cursive to be included in your academic paper.
Example 2: “(This Ain’t) No Thinkin’ Thing” was Trace Adkins’ first number-one song, released in 1997 on his album Dreamin’ Out Loud.
In the example, “(This Ain’t) No Thinkin’ Thing” is the song title, and “Dreamin’ Out Loud” is the album name. But what should you do if the song and album titles are the same? There is a simple solution: just use quotation marks when quoting the song and italics when addressing the album.
Example 3: “How Do You Like Me Now?” is my favorite song from the album How Do You Like Me Now?
How to Quote a Song Title: General Guidelines
We recommend always asking your academic advisor about the proper academic format. In general, there are the following formatting rules regarding song titles:
🔖 Place quotation marks around the names of songs: Using the correct typographic quotation marks and apostrophes (curly quotes) can ensure that your professionally typeset text looks its best.
🎼 Make all album and CD titles italic: Avoid fake italics in typeset material. Although this isn’t a rule of grammar, it is a rule of good printing and design.
📝 Do not underline: Unless you’re using a typewriter or writing the titles by hand, you should not use underlining instead of italics.
FAQ
Follow us on Reddit for more insights and updates.
More from How to Write an Academic Assignment
Comments (0)
Welcome to A*Help comments!
We’re all about debate and discussion at A*Help.
We value the diverse opinions of users, so you may find points of view that you don’t agree with. And that’s cool. However, there are certain things we’re not OK with: attempts to manipulate our data in any way, for example, or the posting of discriminative, offensive, hateful, or disparaging material.