Samer Ismail wrote: "Likewise, on those grounds, would you reject 'The St. Louis Post-Dispatch' because 'The' is not included in the title?" The problem, as I see it, is that newspaper titles are kind of eccentric--and so it doesn't make sense to determine overall rules for article use based on them. Some newspapers have a definite article in their title, and some don't: if I'm not mistaken, the official names are ~The New York Times~ and the ~Los Angeles Times~, for example. But even the LA Times uses a definite article before its name when it refers to itself--it just doesn't italicize it. And no one says "I read a great article in San Francisco Chronicle this morning." So it would be silly to reject a buzz of "The St. Louis Post-Dispatch" because there's no article in its official title--but it doesn't follow from this that it's okay to add an article to the start of any title. I'm inclined to say that, even if there weren't an H.G. Wells novel called "The Invisible Man," a player who added an initial article to the title of Ellison's book should be judged incorrect. (The fact is, that player got the title wrong.) Plus, the NAQT rule claims that adding an article is okay "so long as no other ambiguity is introduced"--but in that case, is an answer of "The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison" correct under NAQT rules? (NAQT isn't clear here.) That's not ambiguous (except in the extraordinarily unlikely case that someone thinks that Ellison wrote the book about the guy who turned himself invisible), but it's still wrong; NAQT's rule suggests that it would be unacceptable, even though its one criterion for judging this issue (ambiguity) doesn't really apply here. --Ed
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