Depending on your college’s admission requirements, you might have written a personal statement or an admission essay prior to your acceptance to a degree or diploma program. Do you remember or know what is unique about such a write-up? An admission essay can be 200 words, however, some colleges might want a graduate applicant to complete a no more than 1500-word personal statement about personal experience, attributes, and motivation to pursue a certain academic program. As such, there’s a high likelihood that you won’t need to cite and reference a source(s).
However, upon acceptance to a college, you’ll need to complete several assignments and essays throughout your years of study. Besides relying on scholarly sources to answer questions or “dissect” a social, economic, or health issue, you might come across a situation where you need to “cite a source within a source.” In such a case, an in-depth understanding of the steps of using italics and quotation marks is necessary to acknowledge information from an article, book, movie, or a scholarly paper.
While there are many guidelines on writing a movie title in an essay, this article aims to eliminate confusion that you might still have in your mind.
General guidelines for writing a movie title in an essay
Never assume that the title is misspelled
Even before delving into how you can apply this rule to appropriately write the title of a movie in an essay, what will be your thought if your essay instruction says, ”Write the negativ effects of GMOs on the environment.” What do you notice from the topic? Without a doubt, everyone can see that the instructor intended to write “negative” instead of “negativ.” So, many students will write an essay on the “negative effects of GMOs.”
What could be the consequence if you apply the same rule to write a movie title in an essay? Take a look at the following scenarios.
You’ve previously watched The Haunting of Hill House and liked it to the extent of repeating it several times. However, your professor wants you to analyze the characters in House on Haunted Hill. Even without a second thought, you assume that your instructor meant The Haunting of Hill House, as two names might mean a paraphrased version of each.
Even if you perfectly write the analysis, you’ll fail. So, it’s imperative that you consider the title of movies as “medical” terms.
Understand the context of the movie in your region
If you’re a student from the UK, UAE, Canada, Africa, or anywhere in the world in a US college, you’ll notice many things about discrepancies in word spellings and sounds. Do you know that some movie titles changed in the US film market? What does this mean?
When you decide to use a specific movie title into an essay, for example, The Road Warrior, it will be best to stick with it rather than trying to interchange it with Mad Max 2, even though they are the same. It’s important to understand that your effort to reduce or eliminate the repetition of words or phrases in your assignment should not be an excuse for introducing confusion. What’s more, if your professor says to write a review on The Road Warrior, you shouldn’t be clever to replace it with Mad Max 2 as it might be a clear indication of you rephrasing an essay from an online database.
It’s because of this reason that the support team at CustomWritings strives to match your academic needs with the best writer when you look for someone who can write an essay for you from scratch. For example, if you need your task of reviewing a movie completed with an ENL expert, all you have to do is select proficient English as your preferred language style.
Be keen with the use of “a” and “the”
When you type a movie title in your essay, how do you use the articles “a” and “the?” Whereas grammar rules obligate you to include “a” and “the” in some instances, you should ensure that they don’t distort the original meaning of the film. Take a look at the following examples to understand.
The Return and The Return premiered in different years are not the same. In the first case, the article “the” is not part of the movie’s name. However, it’s part of the title in the second one. When you italicize the article before the name of the movie, it becomes one word. Therefore, it’s best to be keen when you want to include the titles of films in your essays.
An expert tip on how to write a movie title in an essay APA
Besides citing the producer’s name(s) in your essay, you might want to include its title. In this case, you must italicize the movie’s name rather than using quotation marks. The underlying reason for using this strategy concerns differentiating a movie title in an essay with a direct quote from a source.
What’s more, titles of films in APA should be in the title case, for example, Pirates of the Caribbean. As you’ve noticed, articles, conjunctions, and prepositions must be in lowercase unless they appear first in the name of the movie. For example, in The Return, “the” starts with a capital letter.
It’s important to note that words with over four letters in the title of the movie should be in the sentence case. For instance, in Gone With the Winds, the words “with” and “the’ are in sentence and lower case, respectively, as the latter has four letters.
An expert tip on how to write a movie title in an essay MLA
While the proper way of writing a movie title in an essay in APA and MLA is the same, you might want to omit the inclusion of years when it comes to this formatting style. Do you think that is a good decision? Definitely not, as movies might have the same name, but they are different.
For example, Return (2011) and Return (2020) have different plots. It’s for this reason that you must include the date of premier in your essay, whether in APA or MLA. To properly write the titles of movies, it’s advisable that you’ve the director’s name(s) when you mention it first (“To emphasize specific performers or directors, begin the citation with the name of the desired performer or director, followed by the appropriate title for that person”).
Whereas this article offers invaluable insights into how to write a movie title in an essay, regardless of the formatting style, there’s a lot to learn when it comes to citing and referencing. As such, it will be best if you consider asking an expert at CustomWritings to offer you a detailed reference material or sample. Other than knowing how to incorporate film titles in your papers, you need to read about how to incorporate other scholarly sources in your essays.
