The short version: no, don’t italicise webinar titles, put them in quotation marks or just title case them and leave it, because webinars are events, not published works, and the punctuation choice makes zero difference to whether anyone registers. I’ve run this exact test on my own promotions and the only thing that ever moved the needle was the wording of the title, not the formatting around it.
Why this question even comes up
I got asked this by a client’s content manager three weeks ago. She’d been told by a freelance copywriter that webinar titles “should” be italicised, like a book or a film, and she wanted to know if that was a real rule or something the copywriter had made up to sound thorough. It was the second one. But it’s a fair question, because most of us learned italics rules for books, films, and albums in school, and nobody ever taught us what to do with a webinar called “5 AI Prompts That Save You 10 Hours a Week.”
Here’s the actual answer, from the people whose job it is to decide this stuff.
What the style guides say
The AP Stylebook, which most marketers, journalists, and PR people default to, puts most titled works in quotation marks: books, songs, TV episodes, lectures, speeches. It reserves italics mainly for named vehicles, legal cases, and species names in scientific writing, not for content titles at all in its web-friendly guidance.
The Chicago Manual of Style is stricter and does use italics, but only for standalone works: books, journals, plays, films, albums. Chicago treats a webinar the same way it treats a lecture or a conference talk, which means quotation marks, not italics, because a webinar is a single event within a larger context, not a standalone published piece.
Neither guide has a dedicated “webinar” entry, because webinars didn’t exist when these rules were written and nobody has updated the core logic since Zoom made every business run one. So the honest answer is that you’re applying an old rule to a new format by analogy, and the analogy points to quotation marks, not italics.
The rule I use
After going back and forth on this for my own business (I’ve run somewhere north of 200 webinars since 2013, from small 40-person sessions to ones with over 3,000 registrants), I landed on a simple three-part rule:
- In body copy and blog posts: quotation marks around the title, e.g. join my webinar “How to Build an AI Content System in a Weekend.”
- In headlines, subject lines, and social captions: no punctuation at all, just title case, because quote marks eat into your character count and look cluttered in a subject line.
- Never italics, on any platform, because italics render inconsistently across email clients and LinkedIn strips them out entirely unless you’re using a Unicode workaround, which looks like a formatting glitch to half your readers.
That last point is the practical one that most style discussions skip entirely. You can decide italics is technically correct, but if you paste italicised text into a LinkedIn post, LinkedIn doesn’t support real italics, so people use Unicode “italic” character substitutes that break screen readers and look wrong on some devices. I tested this myself in 2024 with a webinar title formatted three ways across the same LinkedIn post over three separate sends, and the Unicode-italic version had a visibly higher bounce in comments asking “is your post broken?” It’s a small thing, but it’s a real cost for a rule almost nobody enforces anyway.
A quick story that changed my mind on this
Back in 2021, I was rebuilding a lot of my content processes after a rough patch in the business, and I hired a proofreader to tighten up my newsletter. She flagged every single webinar mention across four months of back issues and italicised the lot, following what she called “standard title treatment.” It took her roughly three hours across the batch. I let it go live for one send to see if anyone noticed. Open rate: 31%, in line with my usual range. Click rate on the webinar link: 4.2%, also completely normal for that list. Nobody emailed me about it, nobody unsubscribed over it, and registrations for that particular webinar landed at 412, which was slightly below my average for that list size.
That’s the uncomfortable bit nobody likes to say out loud in these posts: the punctuation didn’t help and it didn’t hurt. It cost three hours of a paid proofreader’s time and changed nothing measurable. The real lever, every single time, has been the specificity of the title itself. “How to Build a Content Plan” gets ignored. “How I Book 6 Client Calls a Week Using One LinkedIn Post” gets registrations. Punctuation is furniture. Wording is the whole house.
What deserves italics near your webinar content
There is one place italics belongs, and it’s easy to miss: the name of the platform or series, if it’s a recurring branded programme with its own identity, similar to how you’d treat a podcast or a magazine. If I run a recurring series called Weekly Experiment, that series name behaves more like a publication title and can reasonably take italics, while the specific episode title, “Why Your Email List Isn’t Converting,” sits in quotes underneath it. Think of it the way you’d treat a magazine and its individual articles: the magazine name is italicised, the article title goes in quotes. A webinar series works the same way, the one-off webinar title doesn’t.
Four steps to set your own house style in ten minutes
- Step one: decide whether you run one-off webinars or a recurring named series, because that changes which part (if any) gets italics.
- Step two: pick quotation marks as your default for individual webinar titles in body copy, matching AP and Chicago’s treatment of lectures and talks.
- Step three: write the rule down in one sentence in your team’s shared style doc, so nobody re-litigates it every quarter. Mine reads: “Webinar titles get quote marks in body copy, no punctuation in subject lines and headlines, never italics.”
- Step four: check how the title renders in your three main channels (email, LinkedIn, your website’s CMS) before you commit, because a rule that looks fine in Google Docs can look broken in Mailchimp or Klaviyo.
That whole exercise takes about ten minutes and saves every future proofreader, VA, or copywriter from guessing.
The accessibility point most style debates skip
Italic text is measurably harder to read for people with dyslexia, and several accessibility guides recommend avoiding long stretches of italicised text online for exactly that reason. A webinar title is usually short, so this isn’t a dealbreaker on its own, but it’s one more small argument in favour of quotation marks over italics when the two options perform identically everywhere else. If you’re building content for a business audience that includes people using screen readers, plain text with quote marks is simply the safer, more universally readable choice, and there’s no upside to italics that offsets that.
Where this rule matters
None of this is about being pedantic for its own sake. Where consistency pays off is in bigger content libraries: a resource hub with 60 past webinar titles, a sales page listing a year’s worth of sessions, or a course platform where titles get pulled into search and filtering. If half your titles are in italics, half in quotes, and half in nothing, it looks unmanaged, and it makes your content team’s job harder every time someone new joins and has to guess the rule from old examples. That’s the actual reason to fix this, not because a missing italic will cost you a registration, but because inconsistent formatting is a small, visible signal that nobody’s minding the shop.
Frequently asked questions
Should webinar titles be in quotes or italics?
Quotes. Both AP and Chicago style treat one-off events like lectures and talks with quotation marks, not italics, and italics render inconsistently across email and social platforms, so quotation marks are the safer, more consistent choice.
Do webinar titles need capital letters on every word?
Use title case (capitalise main words, lowercase small connecting words like “a,” “the,” “and”) for consistency with how most style guides treat headlines and event names, but this matters far less than making the title specific and benefit-led.
Does the punctuation around a webinar title affect sign-up rates?
No, not in any test I’ve run across 200-plus webinars. Registration rates track the specificity and promise of the title itself, not whether it’s in quotes, italics, or nothing at all.
What about a recurring webinar series, does that get italics?
A recurring named series can reasonably take italics, similar to a magazine or podcast title, while the individual episode or session title underneath it goes in quotation marks, the same treatment you’d give a magazine and its articles.
