Writing about Al Jaffee reminded me of a question that keeps popping up in my writing — a question of proper punctuation and style…
As we all know, it is customary to underline or italicize the name of a book or magazine or a newspaper. Most authoritative guides will tell you that when typing out the name of a publication, you don't italicize or underline a "The" even if one is part of the name. For instance, you're supposed to write the New York Times and not The New York Times…or the Saturday Evening Post, not The Saturday Evening Post. This is one of those cases where I usually will sometimes purposely defy the rule and I'll capitalize and underline the "The" just because it looks righter to me. And yes, I know "righter" isn't a word. Neither is "wanna" or "dunno" a lot of other warpings of English that I employ.
Okay. So there's this magazine called MAD. For some reason, it has become very common to capitalize its name and type it as MAD. I dunno who started this but I wanna figure something else out. Almost always, people refer to it as "MAD" followed by the word "magazine" but the "magazine" part is not really part of its name. So assuming we buy into the capitalization of the first part, tell me the correct way to type it in a sentence such as this: "Al Jaffee is still drawing for _______."
- MAD magazine
- MAD Magazine
- MAD magazine
- MAD Magazine
I looked up examples on the web for MAD and also for Time and Life and other publications which are usually referred to with the word "magazine" appended. It seems to be handled all of these ways but most often #2. But I've never seen any style manual that would dictate that form. So what does anyone think?