Three OHR authors/articles were awarded the top prizes for Best Article at the 2025 OHA Annual Meeting: This article describes Professor Chansky’s collaborative undergraduate oral history projects that worked with a variety of community partners to document Puerto Ricans’ experiences with Hurricane Maria and its aftermath, and serves as a model for other crisis oral […]
The Science History Institute (Philadelphia, PA) is currently recruiting for the full-time (35 hours per week) position of Program Associate, Center for Oral History. The Program Associate will focus on the maintenance and growth of the Institute’s oral history collection. Work includes processing audio/video recordings and transcripts; communication with interviewees; planning interviews for ongoing and […]
Announced by the OHA at their annual meeting in Atlanta, the Mason Multi-Media awards recognize “outstanding oral history projects, collections, exhibits, and multimedia presentations for the public.” According to Yolanda Hester, who chaired the committee that selected the winners and whose members included Max Peterson, Mark Caltrain and Simona Tobia, “As in previous years, we […]
December 10th at 6pm An online presentation by Kathryn Nasstrom A meeting of the OHS’ Environment and Climate Change Special Interest GroupThis presentation is situated at the juncture of two important trends in recent oral history research: 1- oral history and political violence; 2- oral histories of the land and environment. I take a case […]
A key feature of any style is how it capitalizes words in the titles of books, articles, and other works. Most recommend a variation of title case, or what CMOS until very recently referred to as headline style (before the publication of the 18th edition).
And though there are some differences among the major styles—for example, AP and APA capitalize prepositions of four letters or more in a title, whereas for Chicago it’s now five or more—they all specify an initial capital for verbs, regardless of length.
This includes the word “is,” as in the song title “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do” (Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield, 1962).* When such a title is mentioned in ordinary text or in a source citation, there are generally no exceptions (see CMOS 13.89). But there are some nuances to consider, including some graphical contexts where it may be appropriate to leave “is” lowercase.
“Is” is a mere linking verb, the textual equivalent of an equals sign—and it’s only two letters long. So it’s an easy word to forget to capitalize.
Nor does “is” appear all that frequently in titles, considering its ubiquity in ordinary prose. When it is used, it’s sometimes contracted, which is a good way of minimizing its impact. Take the title of the iconic movie It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). Without the contraction, and particularly with a capital I, the emphasis would shift toward the verb: It Is a Wonderful Life.
“Is” is spelled out in the title of the 1997 movie Life Is Beautiful (a translation from the original Italian), so it gets a capital I in Chicago style.‡ But the word is de-emphasized in the poster art for the theatrical release. Notice how the movie’s title is in caps and small caps except for the word “is,” which is in all small caps—and in a smaller font than any of the other letters in the title:
That works well: “Life” and “Beautiful” are the words that matter most.
Consider also the cover for Sue Grafton’s novel Y Is for Yesterday (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2017):**
The connecting words “is” and “for” are both lowercase, which allows the more important elements in the title (namely the Y’s) to stand out. (The preposition “for” would be lowercase in Chicago and most other styles.) In Grafton’s title—as in each of the titles mentioned in this post—“is” plays more of a supporting than a leading role.
A lowercase “is” like the one on the Grafton cover, where the small i alone signals that the word is unimportant, would be unlikely to make it past Chicago’s editorial team. But our publications tend to be scholarly in nature; in fiction and other creative contexts, rules are made to be broken.
“Is” is a verb, so unless it’s hiding behind a contraction, it should always be capitalized in titles mentioned in the text or in a Chicago-style source citation. But it’s a humble little word that doesn’t always like to stand out. In a graphical setting like a book cover or a movie poster, bigger isn’t necessarily better.
* Note that “Up” is an adverb, not a preposition, in the title phrase “Breaking Up”—and therefore capitalized (see also CMOS 8.160, rule 3).
† The subheads in this post are in title case, but sentence case is also an option for subheads, provided it’s consistently applied across a document (see CMOS 2.22 and 8.159).
‡ Wikipedia’s entry for Life Is Beautiful, as of August 23, 2021 (the day before this post was originally published), mentioned or cited that title twenty-eight times (up to and including the bibliography); in thirteen of those instances—or nearly half—the word “is” was spelled with a small i. Apparently, it’s natural to want to lowercase “is” in a title. (As of July 27, 2025, most of these had been fixed.) Such inconsistency isn’t a problem with the Italian title—La vita è bella—where sentence case (and, by extension, lowercase for è, “is”) is the norm (see CMOS 11.8).
** According to CMOS 7.67, letters used as letters are normally italicized (as when mentioned in text). Ditto for “Yesterday,” a word used as a word—which, according to CMOS 7.66, would normally be set in either italics or quotation marks. In an italic title, however, these distinctions are unnecessary (see CMOS 8.175).
Top image: Life Is Beautiful, by Linnaea Mallette (public domain).
A key feature of any style is how it capitalizes words in the titles of books, articles, and other works. Most recommend a variation of title case, or what CMOS until very recently referred to as headline style (before the publication of the 18th edition).
And though there are some differences among the major styles—for example, AP and APA capitalize prepositions of four letters or more in a title, whereas for Chicago it’s now five or more—they all specify an initial capital for verbs, regardless of length.
This includes the word “is,” as in the song title “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do” (Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield, 1962).* When such a title is mentioned in ordinary text or in a source citation, there are generally no exceptions (see CMOS 13.89). But there are some nuances to consider, including some graphical contexts where it may be appropriate to leave “is” lowercase.
“Is” is a mere linking verb, the textual equivalent of an equals sign—and it’s only two letters long. So it’s an easy word to forget to capitalize.
Nor does “is” appear all that frequently in titles, considering its ubiquity in ordinary prose. When it is used, it’s sometimes contracted, which is a good way of minimizing its impact. Take the title of the iconic movie It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). Without the contraction, and particularly with a capital I, the emphasis would shift toward the verb: It Is a Wonderful Life.
“Is” is spelled out in the title of the 1997 movie Life Is Beautiful (a translation from the original Italian), so it gets a capital I in Chicago style.‡ But the word is de-emphasized in the poster art for the theatrical release. Notice how the movie’s title is in caps and small caps except for the word “is,” which is in all small caps—and in a smaller font than any of the other letters in the title:
That works well: “Life” and “Beautiful” are the words that matter most.
Consider also the cover for Sue Grafton’s novel Y Is for Yesterday (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2017):**
The connecting words “is” and “for” are both lowercase, which allows the more important elements in the title (namely the Y’s) to stand out. (The preposition “for” would be lowercase in Chicago and most other styles.) In Grafton’s title—as in each of the titles mentioned in this post—“is” plays more of a supporting than a leading role.
A lowercase “is” like the one on the Grafton cover, where the small i alone signals that the word is unimportant, would be unlikely to make it past Chicago’s editorial team. But our publications tend to be scholarly in nature; in fiction and other creative contexts, rules are made to be broken.
“Is” is a verb, so unless it’s hiding behind a contraction, it should always be capitalized in titles mentioned in the text or in a Chicago-style source citation. But it’s a humble little word that doesn’t always like to stand out. In a graphical setting like a book cover or a movie poster, bigger isn’t necessarily better.
* Note that “Up” is an adverb, not a preposition, in the title phrase “Breaking Up”—and therefore capitalized (see also CMOS 8.160, rule 3).
† The subheads in this post are in title case, but sentence case is also an option for subheads, provided it’s consistently applied across a document (see CMOS 2.22 and 8.159).
‡ Wikipedia’s entry for Life Is Beautiful, as of August 23, 2021 (the day before this post was originally published), mentioned or cited that title twenty-eight times (up to and including the bibliography); in thirteen of those instances—or nearly half—the word “is” was spelled with a small i. Apparently, it’s natural to want to lowercase “is” in a title. (As of July 27, 2025, most of these had been fixed.) Such inconsistency isn’t a problem with the Italian title—La vita è bella—where sentence case (and, by extension, lowercase for è, “is”) is the norm (see CMOS 11.8).
** According to CMOS 7.67, letters used as letters are normally italicized (as when mentioned in text). Ditto for “Yesterday,” a word used as a word—which, according to CMOS 7.66, would normally be set in either italics or quotation marks. In an italic title, however, these distinctions are unnecessary (see CMOS 8.175).
Top image: Life Is Beautiful, by Linnaea Mallette (public domain).
