College Editorial Guide - Titles

Academic degrees
If mention of degrees is necessary, the preferred form is to avoid an abbreviation and use a phrase such as: John Jones has a doctorate in psychology.
Use an apostrophe in bachelor’s degree, master’s, etc. However, there is no possessive in Bachelor of Arts or Master of Science.

Academic Departments/Offices
Use lowercase except for words that are proper nouns or adjectives (the history department, the English department) or when “department” is part of the official and formal name (University of Connecticut Department of Medicine).

Capitalize “office” if it is part of an agency’s formal name: Office of Global Education. Capitalize the names of major subdivisions. Example: Academic Affairs. Use lowercase for the internal elements when they have names that are widely used generic terms (e.g. board of directors).

Academic/Occupational Titles
In general, confine capitalization to formal titles used directly before an individual’s name. Examples: President Jolicoeur will speak at Commencement. The president will speak at Commencement. Pamela Jolicoeur, Concordia College president, will speak at Commencement.

Note on usage of “Rev.”: When this description is used before an individual’s name, it is preceded by the word “the” because, unlike “Mr.” and “Mrs.,” the abbreviation “Rev.” does not stand for a noun. The same applies for “The Honorable” as in a judge; it is abbreviated as “The Hon.” Do not abbreviate titles before a name when inside quotations.

Composition titles
(Includes titles of books, movies, computer games, operas, plays, poems, songs, television programs, lectures, speeches and works of art)
Put quotation marks around the names of all such works except the Bible and books that are primarily catalogs of reference material.
Capitalize the principal words, including prepositions and conjunctions of four or more letters.
Capitalize an article (the, a, an) or any word fewer than four letters if it is the first or last word in a title.

Magazine titles
Capitalize the name but do not place it in quotes. Lowercase “magazine” unless it is part of the publication’s formal title (Harper’s Magazine, Time magazine).

Newspaper titles
Capitalize “the” in a newspaper’s name only if that is the way the publication prefers to be known. Do not place name in quotes. Lowercase “the” before newspaper name if a story mentions several papers, some of which use “the” as part of the name and some of which do not. When location is needed but is not part of the official name, use parentheses: The Huntsville (Ala.) Times.

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