Italics

[jack]

I'm fairly sure I use bold, italic and *starred* in subtly different ways. I'm often fascinated by such subtle distinctions, such as the subtleties in translating into one of two related words.

The thing is, I can't put my finger on what the differences might be. (The nearest I've come is in observed starring can star two consecutive words separately, or as part of a phrase, which is occasionally useful.) Does anyone recognise a difference in themselves?

I was reminded of this by the idea in html that you have a semantic tag, eg. em for emphasis, and a mapping from that to display, where the mapping could be overridden. Which is definitely the right way, but not yet universal. And part of the reason I'm slow in adopting is that having acquired subtle differences, I don't like losing them, even if it would make sense. After all, if I can't explain them, I can't persuade anyone to make a tag for them :)

A tag for citation, a common usage of italic, makes sense, as often that is represented in a specific way on different web-pages, or in different ways in a piece of text, (eg. in theory, nested cite tags might helpfully do different things). And I can certainly live with only one form of textual emphasis, I use none at all in formal writing. But I don't like to :) And I have a nagging feeling that if I write em, then someone who hasn't configured their web browser might see it as bold[1], and think I was shouting, whereas I'd only meant italic, and it's quite different :)

[1] That is a difference, that bold stands out of the page a lot more, whereas italic doesn't. So both serve some function. I am confused with google chat because it renders starred text as bold, and I use stars both for actions (*hug*) which should be bold and emphasis (I *did* say that) which shouldn't, at least in my writing :)

Comments

[simont]

I certainly use bold and italic for different things. Bold is used for drawing attention to something that I worry the reader might otherwise miss completely (e.g. "NOTE: don't try this at home"), whereas italic is used to substitute for tone of voice, indicating which of the words in a sentence you were reading anyway is the most important or unexpected or key.

In environments where I have bold and/or italics available, I only use stars for emote-style actions (*hug*), never for emphasis. Even then, I'm at least as likely to write emotes using angle brackets (<hug>).

In ASCII, actually, I almost never use stars for emphasis (though I'll use them for emotes as above), and when I do I use them for really strong emphasis along the same lines as bold ("*NOTE*: don't actually do this"). For italic-level emphasis in ASCII I use underscores ("the _real_ problem is..."). The only exception to that is in subject lines on Monochrome, because Mono uses terminal escape sequences to underline the whole of a subject line and hence my surrounding underscores become invisible in most fonts, so I use stars for emphasis under protest.

[pizza.maircrosoft.com (from livejournal.com)]

what about _underline_ (which one of my godmothers uses surprisingly freely in handwritten text) and CAPITALS ... do you ever use /these/ which are to italic as *star* is to bold (except not quite, somehow).

[rochvelleth.livejournal.com]

For me...

- bold is to make sure something isn't missed or is marked as important

- italics are for a) inner thoughts of a character (as opposed to speech), b) sarcasm, c) something similar to scare quotes, d) quoting online, e) sometimes quoting in a foreign language, f) very occasionally to make sure different bodies of text are differentiated.

- stars are for a) representing italics in emails (or anywhere you can't or can't be bothered to make something italic) but only really for b and c above, b) to put emphasis on something (when opposed with italics, i.e. when you do have access to e.g. HTML, or c) representing an action (e.g. *smiles*).

I think that covers it :)

[rochvelleth.livejournal.com]

P.S. In MS Word, if you leave autoformat on[1] and put stars around a word it will automatically change it to bold, IIRC, which I found weird because it doesn't at all reflect my usage.

[1] Don't, obviously.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

I find it annoying when apps such as GMail chat convert stars to bold. I haven't noticed it in Word, but that's probably because I only use Word for formal writing, whereas I use GMail chat for, well, chat.

A related phenomenon is when they convert a smiley like :) to an upright smiley face image, sometimes coloured yellow. To me they mean different things - the text emoticon can mean "My last comment was tongue-in-cheek" whereas the bright yellow face seems to mean "I'm happy!" It can look out of place next to a tongue-in-cheek but not particularly happy comment.

[ravingglory.livejournal.com]

Well in my head it works like this: bold is for louder, (or for style- like to make the tile stand out a bit), italic is for stressed words, and stars are for emotes and don't indicate a change in the voice, but rather a lack of voice. (Also a talking about yourself in the third person)