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Grammatically Correct: The writer's essential guide to punctuation ...

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Italics<br />

Italic type serves <strong>to</strong> make text stand out distinctively. It may be<br />

employed for stylistic reasons, lending emphasis, irony or urgency<br />

<strong>to</strong> what it encompasses, or for reasons of convention.<br />

Its main uses are the following:<br />

• Highlighting words that have special significance<br />

• Emphasizing a speaker's words<br />

• Setting off non-English words<br />

• Setting off terms, titles and other special text<br />

• Underscoring a point in a quote<br />

HIGHLIGHTING SIGNIFICANT WORDS<br />

Italicizing a word or passage draws attention <strong>to</strong> it, informing the<br />

reader that it holds particular meaningfulness.<br />

She twisted the dial, right, left, right again, heard the click as the lock<br />

yielded, opened the safe-and it was empty.<br />

After years of <strong>to</strong>il and obscurity, he could finally claim, with justifiable<br />

pride, that he was one of them.<br />

When my friend said she was setting me up on a blind date with a Herbert<br />

Snorkei-Winkworth, I didn't realize she meant one of the Snorkei­<br />

Winkworths.<br />

Given that it was my house he was being so generous with, I did not share<br />

his enthusiasm about putting up the entire circus troupe and their<br />

elephants for the week.<br />

Italics are particularly important when they clarify the meaning<br />

of what is being said. Consider the nine different interpretations of<br />

the following sentence:<br />

277

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