The softer side of emphasis

Using italics to best effect

Oct 27, 2025

I love italics. The contrasting type serves a lot of purposes, like making foreign-language words stand out so they don’t just look like typos.

I love putting the character’s direct thoughts in italics, because doing so clearly distinguishes thoughts from conversation and helps the reader absorb the story easily and quickly.

I love putting single words in dialogue in italics, because it shows a character’s speech patterns and tells a lot about that person (drama queen, much?).

I love using italics for emphasis, because it helps the reader hear how the character sounds. And that’s important, because where the emphasis falls can change the meaning of the sentence. In a movie or an audio book, we can actually hear how the character speaks, how he emphasizes some words more than others. But the only way to show that in print is with italics.

Take this sentence, for example. [Which, sadly, is not original.]

I didn’t say you stole my money.

But what does that speaker really mean? There are seven words in that sentence, and depending on which one we emphasize, there are seven different meanings.

1. I didn’t say you stole my money. (Someone else said it, but it wasn’t me.)

2. I didn’t say you stole my money. (Whatever you think you heard, I said something entirely different.)

3. I didn’t say you stole my money. (I may have thought it, but I didn’t say it.)

4. I didn’t say you stole my money. (I suspect it might have been someone else instead.)

5. I didn’t say you stole my money. (Maybe it was only a paperwork mistake and the money isn’t really missing.)

6. I didn’t say you stole my money. (But someone else’s money has gone bye-bye.)

7. I didn’t say you stole my money. (My heart, now? That’s another thing entirely. You definitely stole my heart.)

BUT…

But italics are hard to read – an entire paragraph of them is an endurance contest. Don’t put flashbacks or long sections of thoughts or memories in italics. If you must, choose a different font instead, to make things stand out — but better yet, make the narrative itself so smooth that the reader moves easily from current day to past events to introspection.

Italics are also awfully easy to overuse, not only with long passages of thoughts but when there’s a word or two emphasized in every sentence. One word emphasized on a page stands out, but when many words are emphasized, none of them draws attention — except for becoming tiresome to the reader’s eyes.

And then there’s the issue of using italics improperly. [In the following examples, bold is only used to make the sample sentence stand out. Normally we wouldn’t use both bold and italics.] Like:

She wondered, was he really going to ignore her like that?

She’s expressing a direct thought – the idea that’s going through her head right this instant – so it wouldn’t be past tense. And if our female POV character is wondering about herself, she’d use first person rather than third. And we’d only put the words she’s actually thinking in italics.

So it would be: She wondered, Is he really going to ignore me like that?

I’m seeing a lot of cases lately where the author uses italics for businesses and locations – like this: She filled the car with gas at the 24-to-Go station, stopped at Bistro’s for a coffee, and then popped into Baker’s Dozen for a pastry to go with it for her drive to the Hamptons.

Looks a bit odd, doesn’t it? Distracting, too. So nope – just dump the italics.

And someday, we’ll talk about using all caps (WHICH IS LIKE SHOUTING!) and bold (which is kinda like shouting), and ellipses (. . .), and em-dashes (–), and excessive exclamation points(!!!!).

Sigh. The Snarky Editor’s work is never done.

The Snarky Editor

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