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What is the motivation behind capitalizing the first letter of each word except prepositions in news, articles and blog post titles?

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It's convention? But really, a title is meant to stand out - it is in some sense the most important text on a page - and capital letters help do this. With regards to prepositions, they're of lesser importance within the title itself, and hence don't really need to stand out.

It's really as simple as that, I think.

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    Yes, it comes down to content words vs. function words. Content words get capitalized because they are the "real" words of the title.
    – Kosmonaut
    Commented Nov 13, 2010 at 17:52
  • Exactly. It's almost a psychological thing - the reader's attention should be drawn to the title, especially the most important ("real") words.
    – Noldorin
    Commented Nov 14, 2010 at 2:45
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I agree to Noldorin that the capitalization of titles is convention that titles are meant to stand out. I would like to add that the title of a book, an article, etc. is the “name” of the book, the article, etc. Because content words in a proper name are capitalized in English, this may also be part of the reasons to capitalize titles.

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  • i find this much more plausible than the other answer. there are other ways of making text stand out, if that were all there were to it.
    – Toothrot
    Commented Jan 3, 2020 at 17:47

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