thread: 2009-01-21 : Italics
On 2009-01-26, Abkajud wrote:
Jesse, I think I do the exact same thing.
I have this battle within myself over whether or not my reader receives the correct inflection of the dialogue. I go back and forth as to what needs italics, and then end up with some kind of happy medium.
I think em dashes convey a certain tone, one that's less halting or abrupt, that semicolons lack. It's like putting ellipses between clauses to give that slightly more contiguous feel, without looking like a wombat for using ellipses too much.
I think back to cranky, dead, ol' John Gardner and his hatred of italics; in his book about writing, he said that italics-users were slaves to a sort of guileless, pitiful optimism (somehow, he inferred this), and that using italics meant that your words didn't carry enough punch on their own.
I say that sometimes you need to point out where the sentence really gets emphasized, but then again, I've looked like a knob on many occasions by italicizing the wrong word.
