Check the spelling of every word in the title.
Capitalize the first letter of the first word in the title. For example, an essay titled "The Study of Class in Franklin J. Schaffner's 'Planet of the Apes'" requires that "The," a definite article, be capitalized, just as the word would be if it appeared at the beginning of a sentence.
Capitalize all the nouns in the title. In our example ("The Study of Class in Franklin J. Schaffner's 'Planet of the Apes'"), "Study," "Class," "Franklin J. Schaffner's," "Planet" and "Apes" are all nouns to be capitalized.
Make sure all prepositions are lower-cased. In "The Study of Class in Franklin J. Schaffner's 'Planet of the Apes,'" "of" and "in" are prepositions that should not be capitalized.
Add punctuation marks where necessary. Place punctuation points, such as colons, semicolons and commas where they're needed.
For example, in the essay title "Peter Jackson's King Kong: A Modern Take on the Beauty and the Beast Fable," a colon is added between the first part of the title and the second descriptive part of the title. Notice that the other grammatical rules still apply to the title--capitalization and lower-casing where necessary.
In the title "Spawning Rituals of Great White Sharks, Mako Sharks and Basking Sharks," commas appear to separate the names of the shark species. Notice that a comma isn't necessary between "Mako Sharks" and "and." This comma is called a serial comma or an Oxford comma, and the essay title is grammatically correct whether it's used or not.
Add quotation marks around an essay title whenever one is used in the text of an essay and on the works-cited page.