Italics Are NOT Your Friends
Write Better Now Round Up
People, I have terrible news.
Italics are not your friends. They should not be sprinkled on every page of your story (or your email) to add emphasis or just to look fancy. There is a place for them. There are also some places that they shouldn’t be.
Just like a hamster shouldn’t be in a Texas Road House when the italics is in the wrong place, you notice.
A lot of writers don’t trust our readers (gasp! I know!) or we don’t trust our ability to convey our message to our readers, and when this happens, it means that we do things like:
Saying everything three times: “Yes!” she said nodding affirmatively.
Over explaining: He cried and tears came out of his eyes because he was so sad about the death of his hamster.
Using italics to show what word you want to emphasize in a sentence. Why wouldn’t you do that, Carrie?
Well, because it’s silly.
Look, you have to trust your reader to intuit the emphasis in the sentence that you are writing. You SHOULD NOT resort to all caps or italics to do this.
SENTENCE STRUCTURE IS YOUR FRIEND
Sentences have a beginning, middle, and end, just like a novel or a blog post or a phone call with your great nana. The parts that are naturally important to our brains are the beginning and the end.
The middle? That’s the fluff. It’s the mumble part. It’s a great love of town officials and lawyers.
Here let’s take a sentence.
I am a woman who has a great deal of hamsters.
It’s a bit mucky, right?
Even putting it all in italics doesn’t help. It’s just all emphasized now like it’s all equally important.
I am a woman who has a ton of hamsters.
You could chose to select one bit to emphasize.
I am a woman who has a ton of hamsters.
So, okay. Interesting. but the real stress of the sentence is hamsters because it’s the last word and it’s because it’s that last word. And then it’s on I. That’s because it’s the first word. A third stress is on woman because it’s the object.
But if we want to change what’s important to that sentence and what is stressed, we just tweak the sentence.
I am a woman who has hamsters, a ton.
Even if I italicized the word ton, it doesn’t really add any emphasis.
I am a woman who has hamsters, a ton.
Or I could fiddle with it more.
I am a woman who has hamsters. A ton.
I am a woman who has hamsters. A ton of them.
I have hamsters. A ton of hamsters.
Let’s use another quick example.
In our house, there is no singing to Abba.
In our house, singing to Abba is not allowed.
Do you see the difference in emphasis? Wild, right? Writing is all about understanding the structure of a story, but also about the structure of a sentence and using the tools to make it work for you without making you look silly or hysterical or a little much, which is what happens when you use a ton of caps or italics.
You can use repetition to do this too, but sometimes that gets a bit goofy if you aren’t doing it right. I’ll try to remember to talk about that soon.
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CRAFT EXERCISE
This one is from Reedsy’s blog.
