emphasis within italics

[Panty Wrangler]

From a stylistic perspective I've elected to use italics for internal dialog/thoughts. I'm also using italics from time to time for emphasis in other places. I only use bold for chapter titles, scene breaks, etc.

Poking around the guidance I've seen online is that underline is a really bad idea in fiction generally, and that bold should be used very sparingly, if at all; and never ever in combination with italics.

So, given my stylistic choice to use italics for internal dialog, what would you recommend for conveying emphasis within italics?

Bob's brain felt like it was literally on fire, he was so confused.
"This is a really bad idea" thought Bob.
"Though this one might be even worse" he thought.

Thoughts?

 

[SimonDoom]

I believe the correct approach is to reverse the usual roman-italics convention and use plain roman type.

 

[NotWise]

From a stylistic perspective I've elected to use italics for internal dialog/thoughts. I'm also using italics from time to time for emphasis in other places. I only use bold for chapter titles, scene breaks, etc.

Poking around the guidance I've seen online is that underline is a really bad idea in fiction generally, and that bold should be used very sparingly, if at all; and never ever in combination with italics.

So, given my stylistic choice to use italics for internal dialog, what would you recommend for conveying emphasis within italics?

Bob's brain felt like it was literally on fire, he was so confused.
"This is a really bad idea" thought Bob.
"Though this one might be even worse" he thought.

Thoughts?

If you're going to worry about it enough to bring it here, then I'd say to stop using italics for internal dialog, and just use them for emphasis and/or for non-English words or phrases.

Whether something is internal dialog or not should be clear from context and tags. You shouldn't need to depend on typography to make that clear. When you use italics that way, you run the risk that your block of italics will be split across a page break, which will screw with your typography. Even more, the Lit android app doesn't show italics, so for readers who use the app, you're typography is a wasted effort.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Use with caution and in moderation.

When html goes wrong it can go spectacularly wrong (the whole second page of a story switched to italics, you say? Yes, your honour).

Some devices don't render italics at all.

Large chunks of italics in text gets tedious to read after a while, especially if your character is self-indulgently thoughtful all the time.

Far better, I think, to designate internal monologue by context, not font. There are plenty of ways to make it quite clear what's going on.

 

[gunhilltrain]

I believe the correct approach is to reverse the usual roman-italics convention and use plain roman type.

I believe this is the standard way of handling it. I know, it looks wrong, but nothing else seems to work.

 

[KeithD]

I believe the correct approach is to reverse the usual roman-italics convention and use plain roman type.

This.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Use with caution and in moderation.

When html goes wrong it can go spectacularly wrong (the whole second page of a story switched to italics, you say? Yes, your honour).

Some devices don't render italics at all.

Large chunks of italics in text gets tedious to read after a while, especially if your character is self-indulgently thoughtful all the time.

Far better, I think, to designate internal monologue by context, not font. There are plenty of ways to make it quite clear what's going on.

I'd go with the moderation. It seems okay when I do it, but I don't have line after line of it. I'm happy with the results. Ah, some mobile devices don't render it, I know. Anyway, Simon Doom up above told him the standard method for handling his problem.

 

[Panty Wrangler]

I'd go with the moderation.
...
Anyway, Simon Doom up above told him the standard method for handling his problem.

Got it. Use in moderation and flip from italic to normal for emphasis within a thought.

Thanks all!

 

[Rustyoznail]

Russ shrugged and said, "Well, I use double quotes when someone is speaking out loud, single for thoughts. I'm really not fussed if it's grammatically correct or not."

'That's bound to set up a grammar war,' he thought.

 

[BiscuitHammer]

I use italics very frequently, for emphasis strain of a spoken word, to illustrate a character's active thoughts, or when using song lyrics to help set a scene. They convey the words of the second party on the other end of a telephone or digital discussion (with quotation marks). Italics also display someone speaking in another language that isn't English (say, Freja and her Danish), but I also use it on English words and sentences to indicate the speaker is using another language, so that the reader can still follow.

I can't think of an occasion where I've underlined. And bold is incredibly rare. Bold is combined with italics to indicate a spell is being chanted in one of my fantasy stories. If I wrote a Cthulu-esque horror story with a disembodied voice ("You fool. Warren is DEAD!"), I would use italics and bold to illustrate its otherworldly nature and sound.

To be honest, if you see bold in my stories, chances are it means I highlighted the word or passage for future editing and just forgot. Fail...

All-caps is used for people shouting or screaming very loudly (say, an unexpected game of Kancho). It's thankfully rare.

I use italics a lot, and variously. But I believe it helps keep the readers clear on what's happening. At least, I've never had any tantrums thrown at me about it yet, so I'm assuming. When I do something my readers don't understand, I hear about it, very often in all caps.

 

[KeithD]

Underlining has only had meaning in the publishing world for typed manuscripts. Typewriters couldn't render italics, so reversing and underscoring was made do to designate italics until the manuscript could get into the print phase. There's no other reason for underscoring ever to have existed in prose publishing. And the computer, capable of rendering italics, replaced the typewriter in publishing decades ago.

Of course if you use it consistently and Laurel lets it go through at Literotica, you're good to go with it. If.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Got it. Use in moderation and flip from italic to normal for emphasis within a thought.

Thanks all!

The italics within italics issue doesn't come up very often, in my experience. I know you are supposed to use italics for movie titles and such, but if you skip that within another italic line it's not a big deal.

 

[NotWise]

Underlining has only had meaning in the publishing world for typed manuscripts. Typewriters couldn't render italics, so reversing and underscoring was made do to designate italics until the manuscript could get into the print phase. There's no other reason for underscoring ever to have existed in prose publishing. And the computer, capable of rendering italics, replaced the typewriter in publishing decades ago.

Of course if you use it consistently and Laurel lets it go through at Literotica, you're good to go with it. If.

I typed a lot of my high school and college manuscripts on Dad's IBM Selectric. I could switch back and forth between Roman and Italic with a three-second delay to switch the type ball. Whiting out a typo took about as much time as switching the font. Typos were a bad thing.

On the other hand, most of my typing I did in grad school was done on a portable Royal I got from my grandmother. It gave me Courier Roman and that's how I wrote.

I hauled that old thing with me when I was working on my Master's thesis, and it worked until the ribbon broke. The closest office/stationary shop was in Taos. At night I could see the lights of Taos from the top of my 1963 Ford van. They sparkled against the foot of the mountains about forty miles to the east.

I settled down and read "Gravity's Rainbow" instead of writing, and I listened to the coyotes howl in the night.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Russ shrugged and said, "Well, I use double quotes when someone is speaking out loud, single for thoughts. I'm really not fussed if it's grammatically correct or not."

'That's bound to set up a grammar war,' he thought.

Now that I think about it, most novelists I've read don't use italics for thoughts.

Then there's the late David Foster Wallace, who had footnotes or endnotes that have footnotes themselves. He was either showing off or he was a bit unbalanced, or maybe both.

 

[gunhilltrain]

I typed a lot of my high school and college manuscripts on Dad's IBM Selectric. I could switch back and forth between Roman and Italic with a three-second delay to switch the type ball. Whiting out a typo took about as much time as switching the font. Typos were a bad thing.

On the other hand, most of my typing I did in grad school was done on a portable Royal I got from my grandmother. It gave me Courier Roman and that's how I wrote.

I hauled that old thing with me when I was working on my Master's thesis, and it worked until the ribbon broke. The closest office/stationary shop was in Taos. At night I could see the lights of Taos from the top of my 1963 Ford van. They sparkled against the foot of the mountains about forty miles to the east.

I settled down and read "Gravity's Rainbow" instead of writing, and I listened to the coyotes howl in the night.

Ah, the good old days (which weren't always so good). I had a Smith-Corona electric, and in college I did two drafts. The second one had to be the final one; I wasn't going to do it a third time. If I really head to, I'd write in corrections with a pen and proofreader marks. The professors would accept that as long as it wasn't excessive.

 

[NotWise]

Ah, the good old days (which weren't always so good). I had a Smith-Corona electric, and in college I did two drafts. The second one had to be the final one; I wasn't going to do it a third time. If I really head to, I'd write in corrections with a pen and proofreader marks. The professors would accept that as long as it wasn't excessive.

Yea, one draft and one final, but my Prof's didn't take kindly to hand-written proof-reading notes. Bastards they were.

I've never really looked at that as the good old days. Typewriters weren't really the fun part. The girl waiting for me when I got back to town -- she was the fun part.

 

[KeithD]

Now that I think about it, most novelists I've read don't use italics for thoughts.

What you actually mean is that most U.S. publishers don't use italics for thoughts. format and book design are the province of the publisher, not the author (unless the author regularly brings the publishing house big bucks). And most U.S. publishers don't use italics for thoughts because the publishing authority that most of them use, the Chicago Manual of Style, doesn't sanction using italics for thoughts.

Here, of course, you can get away with that if you want.

 

[KeithD]

Ah, the good old days (which weren't always so good). I had a Smith-Corona electric, and in college I did two drafts. The second one had to be the final one; I wasn't going to do it a third time. If I really head to, I'd write in corrections with a pen and proofreader marks. The professors would accept that as long as it wasn't excessive.

I rendered six published novels with an electric typewriter. and Whiteout, as necessary. I Don't think anyone will hear me complaining about the usefulness of a computer w/ printer.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Yea, one draft and one final, but my Prof's didn't take kindly to hand-written proof-reading notes. Bastards they were.

I've never really looked at that as the good old days. Typewriters weren't really the fun part. The girl waiting for me when I got back to town -- she was the fun part.

Well, it was maybe one, or at the most two in each paper. I had one English professor who got upset with typos where I had typed "there" for "their" or something like that a couple of times. The phrase he wrote on the paper was, I think, "sinister lapses in grammar." You have to be an English professor to call them "sinister," but he definitely used that word.

By the way, it's sobering to think that any girls I knew in college are now about sixty-five to seventy-years-old. One of them is my ex-wife.

 

[SamScribble]

... I settled down and read "Gravity's Rainbow" instead of writing, and I listened to the coyotes howl in the night.

Ah, so you're the chap who read Gravity's Rainbow. I knew that there was one somewhere.

 

[SimonDoom]

Italics and underlining are, in my experience, interchangeable. I've been at my job long enough that I go back before the widespread use of word processors, and I dictated things and had a secretary type it up. Before word processors, people who worked in offices and typed memos, or correspondence, or anything that had to be filed somewhere, used underlining where a publishing house would use italics. Once word processors took over, underlining was mostly replaced by italics, which are much more elegant than underlining.

I do not miss the typewriter one bit.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Ah, so you're the chap who read Gravity's Rainbow. I knew that there was one somewhere.

"Me, sir, me, me!"

Can't remember a damn thing about it, unless it's the one with alligators in New York's sewers. But that might be V.

We moved recently, and I found my old copies of both. Might give them another go.

 

[SamScribble]

"Me, sir, me, me!"

Can't remember a damn thing about it, unless it's the one with alligators in New York's sewers. But that might be V.

We moved recently, and I found my old copies of both. Might give them another go.

Well, there were a lot of characters in Gravity's Rainbow, EB. But I don't recall alligators. So, yes, maybe V.

At least you still have a copy of GR. I have no idea what happened to mine. However, I do still have my copies of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. It's probably time to give Ulysses another glance.

 

[PennameWombat]

Russ shrugged and said, "Well, I use double quotes when someone is speaking out loud, single for thoughts. I'm really not fussed if it's grammatically correct or not."

'That's bound to set up a grammar war,' he thought.

This is my method. I use italics to render song or movie or other titles and not much else. I don’t like reading long italic stretches so refuse to use them. I’ve used them when quoting song lyrics, but not sure that’s needed.

Now that I think about it, most novelists I've read don't use italics for thoughts.
<snip>

And every other book I’ve read recently or even a long time ago didn’t use italics to render thoughts. Unless they were various sorts of experimental text.

Wallace is a rare author who can do as he will.

 

[rescatooor]

I just use italics for emphasis, really. I usually don't describe my characters thoughts verbatim, mostly because I don't exactly experience thinking that way. Unless it's something that I might say to a friend who was present. No narrators inside my head.

I sometimes also use italics to mark something as a text. Letters and notes, especially handwritten sort. Depends a little on the context, but the point is to make it easier for readers.