Italics: When to Use Them

italics cooltext244514055353042Fiction authors get to play with all sorts of fun things that our English teachers hardly mentioned. One of those things is italics. Oh, sure, you were supposed to put book titles and stuff in italics when you created that bibliography for your term paper the morning you were supposed to turn it in. But italics are good for more than just entries in a bibliography.

Here are some uses for italics that you may not have gotten into in English class: Continue reading “Italics: When to Use Them”

Super Italicize Me!

Authors have been pondering this question since Og figured out he could write dirty limericks on the cave walls with a charred stick: Why didn’t I just become a doctor like my mother wanted? Well…that, and how the heck are we supposed to use italics in our manuscripts?

Before we get into when to use or not use them in our books, let’s fix ourselves a nice cup of tea and talk about formatting. You may have wandered around the Interwebs and read a certain manuscript-formatting commandment bequeathed unto us by a variety of literary agents, editors, and publishers: Continue reading “Super Italicize Me!”