Q. A colleague and I work for an educational software company that is producing a music video, but we’re unsure of the conventions for capitalizing and punctuating the subtitled lyrics. It seems like I’ve seen a lot of subtitled lyrics with pretty sparse punctuation, but we’re just not sure and haven’t been able to find any definitive answers so far. Any suggestions?
A. Educational music videos can aim for a higher standard than the typical YouTube submission. Punctuate and capitalize the lyrics as you would any text—there’s no need to use the old-fashioned poetry style of capping the beginning of every new line.