Italicizing work series and "unofficial" titles

Is "Like a character title" a complete sentence? If so, it needs a period. If not, I think the period from the previous sentence needs to be moved after it.

I have a few concern I'd like to check off.

1. These name referencing rules. They apply to all instances of work names: bibliographic, example lists, and in the page descriptions?
2. It is still confusing as written. It would be nice if some hard and fast rules for what counts as a full work and what counts as a partial or short work could be listed as examples. For example, can we say that novellas, episodes and songs always count as short works, and novels, movies and albums always count as full works?
3. Do the rules ever differ with respect to whether the reference is also a link? What about external links?

edited 25th May '16 7:22:23 PM by war877

Novellas are tricky. Most sites I've seen which cover novellas (e.g. the Hugo and Nebula Awards sites and the like) use italics for novellas which were published as a standalone volume, and quotes for novellas which were published as part of a collection. Which is fully in keeping with the broader guidelines, but does make it tricky for random tropers to know which to use. (Especially since some novellas may end up being published both ways, over time.)

As an example, there's the Science Fiction Awards Database (which uses bold for italics, but otherwise follows what I said above). Note that their page for the 2015 Nebula Awards has three of the six nominated novellas listed with quotes.

None of the novels use quotes, and all of the novelettes and short stories do. It's only novellas that have this inconsistency.

The Other Wiki's page on the Nebula awards for novellas does the same thing. Some have italics, and some have quotes.

edited 25th May '16 8:21:48 PM by Xtifr

Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.

For clarity @crazysamaritan's proposed edit should probably note that "long" works include films, novels, albums, and television series, whereas "short" works include short stories, songs, and episodes of television series. That doesn't help the weird edge cases like novellas, but it at least makes clear the cases that are clear.

The bit about "any page that is an organization of multiple storyarcs without a central theme" is pretty unclear to me; I'm not sure if that's a matter of phrasing or because the rule itself is unclear.

edited 25th May '16 9:17:18 PM by HighCrate

@war877:

1. Yes
2. "When in doubt, it is better to use italics, and have it fixed later." (That's our hard rule)
3. No

@Xtifr:

• Correct — italics for novellas which were published as a standalone volume, and "quotes" for novellas which were published as part of a collection
  • Italics: Any work of standard/long length is emphasized with italics.
  • "Quotes": Any work that is considered short or a portion of a standard length work is emphasized with "quotes".
  • Tricky situations are solved one way: "When in doubt, it is better to use italics, and have it fixed later."

@HighCrate:

• "the cases that are clear." — Every case is clear: if you don't know what applies, put it in italics. Tropers that care about the minutiae can correct it, but the default assumption is italics.
• "any page that is an organization of multiple storyarcs without a central theme" — if you don't think you understand what it means, let's put it to the test.
  • Name a tvtropes works page that the rule does apply to:
  • Name a tvtropes works page that the rule does not apply to:

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

"the cases that are clear." — Every case is clear: if you don't know what applies, put it in italics. Tropers that care about the minutiae can correct it, but the default assumption is italics.

O...kay? Don't see what that has to do with my suggestion to go ahead and specify that novels / films / albums / series are considered "long" and definitely get italics, whereas short stories / songs / episodes are considered "short" and definitely get quotes. I mean, "use italics if you're not sure" is a great rule of thumb, but that doesn't make it a bad idea to enumerate cases that definitely get italics and cases that definitely get quotes.

"any page that is an organization of multiple storyarcs without a central theme" — if you don't think you understand what it means, let's put it to the test.

Name a tvtropes works page that the rule does apply to:

Name a tvtropes works page that the rule does not apply to:

Good test. I can now definitively state that I don't understand this rule. (-:

Let's use an example brought up earlier in the thread: WesternAnimation.Looney Tunes. This is a page collecting tropes from a series of theatrical cartoon shorts that share a general cast of characters and a certain "house style" for lack of a better word, but no particular plot continuity. The shorts were not originally packaged together in an anthology format (being played instead before unrelated films), but have since been packaged together in any number of configurations.

Does this count as a "an organization of multiple storyarcs without a central theme" of the sort that gets capital letters but not italics or quotes? What do we mean by "multiple storyarcs"? The plots of the various shorts? What would be an example of an organization of multiple storyarcs WITH a central theme, and what is that central theme? How does having a central theme change the way we do or do not emphasize that page name?

edited 26th May '16 9:18:37 AM by HighCrate

Given that my first question is answered in the affirmative, I don't think How to Write an Example is the most appropriate place to list this rule. But I do think it is a sufficiently appropriate place.

Example of a work that is multiple story arcs with a central theme: The Dresden Files.

Example of a work that is multiple story arcs without a central theme: Discworld.

Did I get it right? I don't really know about the merry melodies shorts either.

If I recall correctly, the way the Other Wiki does it is that if a name for a group of works is an officially given a collective title, then it's italicized; otherwise not. For example, they italicize The Chronicles of Narnia, because that's apparently the official name for the whole series of seven novels, but don't italicize The Vorkosigan Saga, because that's not an official title. (Although it does appear on most Vorkosigan Saga books these days.)

Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.

I don't particularly care one way or the other, but there is the rule about Clear Concise Witty and people seem to propose Extraclear Long Dry. If you think you can fit a short line in, go ahead. Please post your version of the edit.

"When in doubt, it is better to use italics, and have it fixed later." This is the minutiae that Tropers who care about it can work on. Each Short Film is released as a portion of the same cartoon series. As a film series, it is considered a long work.

---

Correct.

---

Which means it is now an official title.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

But the Vorkosigan Saga books aren't really a unified whole like the Dresden Files. Most of them star Miles Vorkosigan, but there's three books about his mother (one before she was married, so she wasn't even a Vorkisgan at the time), one about his cousin (not a Vorkosigan), one about some other guy completely, which features one of Miles' co-workers as a secondary character, and has no other direct connection to the main storyline, and, most troubling of all, one which is set 200 years before Miles was born, and doesn't even mention the planet he's from!

It's more unified than Discworld, but that's not saying much!

(For the record, before this thread appeared, I'd been using italics with series names in general. But checking on-line usage on other sites, that doesn't seem to be as common as I had previously thought.)

Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.

So do some One-Shot Fic's count as basically short stories and therefore should used quotations instead of getting italicized?

Art Museum Curator and frequent helper of the Web Original deprecation project

Usually I'm not gonna be too strict on it, though if a short story is very much a short story an average person can read in 5-20 minutes and is under 10,000 words, I usually just put double quotes on it.

I also sometimes put a commented out tag:

%% Short stories use double quotes so please refrain from trying to italicize it

at the top of pages if it turns out some users have been constantly changing it to italicized on a short story in the edit history. Mostly to prevent edit wars.

Art Museum Curator and frequent helper of the Web Original deprecation project

Hmmm, is that fine though?

Actually, since this thread is from 2016, do we have rules of thumb of what counts as "short work"? The list here makes sense to me, but what's the size limit is kind of subjective.

Edited by Amonimus on Dec 30th 2023 at 8:07:32 PM

TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup

I've always based it on average reading time or at the very least when it's below 10 thousand words in length

Something like "Mr. Widemouth" [1] for example

Art Museum Curator and frequent helper of the Web Original deprecation project