Remember the story of the boy who cried wolf? Keep it in mind when you use italics for emphasis.
Used conservatively, italics tell the reader, Notice! Vital information!
But when you use them too liberally, italics have the opposite effect. You come across as someone who yells a lot, and readers will soon ignore your shouting. Then when you really do need to highlight a point or give weight to a word, your italics will have lost their credibility and clout.
The Chicago Manual of Style says, “Seldom should as much as a sentence be italicized for emphasis, and never a whole passage.”*
(The same is trebly true, even quadruply, for using boldface in running text. As a rule of thumb, don’t. It looks weird. See?)
Before you italicize a word or a phrase, let alone a sentence, ask yourself the following:
- Is what I’m about to say really so vital that it calls for a signal flare?
- Do I need to have greater faith in my readers to put the right inflection on my sentence or to grasp the significance of my information?
- Am I resorting to italics to make up for a weakness in my writing? Can I instead refine my verbiage to make my point more forcefully without shouting?
Other Uses of Italics
Adding emphasis is only one use of italics. They are also used
- for titles of books, blogs, journals, movies, and television and radio programs.
- to indicate thought. (Aha! thought Elise. So that’s where he’s been hiding!)
- to highlight foreign words.
- to show a word that is about to be defined.
- to call out the first appearance of an unusual or technical term.
All of these uses of italics are common, and this discussion doesn’t apply to them. Here our concern is for you to refrain from crying “Wolf!” unnecessarily. Then your italics will get attention when it counts.
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* The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 7.50.