We (Edith Hope Fine and Judith Josephson) are the Grammar Patrol. Both of us taught for years and are now writers, with thirty plus books between us, including our two popular grammar guides, Nitty-Gritty Grammar and More Nitty-Gritty Grammar. For close to twenty years, we taught writing and grammar basics and now we blog about grammar for writers.

Italics!

To Italicize or Not to Italicize, That Is the Question!

 Back in the Stone Age when we started writing, we printed our work on dot matrix printers, then used ruler and pen to underline anything that had to be italicized. With today’s word processors, italicizing is easy, but when and in what situations?

This decision can be complicated, and we’ll cover the use of italics versus quotation marks in our next post. True confessions: We sometimes double check italics rules in our own Nitty-Gritty Grammar books! For now, let’s focus on a quick review of italics.

 Use italics:

• for scientific names: Tyrannosaurus rex (dino), Staphylococcus (a bacterium that causes boils), Echinocystis lobata (wild cucumber)

• for emphasis: “The will, as only Maxwell knew, made him the sole heir to their parents’ fortune.”

• for screenplay directions, to show how a character should speak a line: Kermit (innocently): “It’s not that easy being green.”

• for words from other languages: bon ami, pièce de la resistance, c’est magnifique, mea culpa, c’est fini, feng shui, E pluribus unum, Hasta mañana, baby!

Tip: Some foreign words (e.g., shish kebab, en masse, cafe latte, and maven) have been used so often that they are no longer italicized.

• for titles:

Magazines—Vanity Fair, Consumer Report, Elle, Cricket

Journals—The California Reader,  JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), Journal of Climate

Newspapers—Arizona Sun, Washington Post, New York Times, Detroit Free Press, Portland Tribune

Books—Cutting for Stone (Abraham Verghese), My Best Everything (Sarah Wones Tomp),  Splat! Another Messy Sunday (The Fantastic Frame series, Lin Oliver)

Long poems—Evangeline (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow), Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey

Movies—La La Land, The Lion King, Moonlight, Victoria and Abdul

Plays—Hamilton; Rent; Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812

Radio shows/Series—Downton Abbey, Fresh Air, This American Life, On the Media

TV shows/series—Young Sheldon, This Is Us, The Americans

Cartoon strips—Frazz (Jef Mallet), Baby Blues (Jerry Scott & Rick Kirkman), Jump Start (Robb Armstrong)

Cartoon shows—Super Why!, The Simpsons, Looney Tunes

Musical works—1812 Overture (Tchaikovsky) Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125 (Beethoven), The Magic Flute (Mozart)

Artistic works—Mona Lisa (Leonardo da Vinci), Come Play (James Hubbell)

CDs and DVDs—Cinema Serenade 2 (Itzhak Perlman & John Williams), Beatriz at Dinner, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Names of ships—Grand Princess, Air Force One, HMS Beagle, USS Constitution

Spacecraft—Cassini, Endeavor, Skylab

There you have it. We hope we’ve refreshed the subject of italics for you. Have you created a cool mnemonic for these rules? Post it below and we’ll share. Check out our two light-hearted Nitty-Gritty Grammar guides for more details, cartoons, and some laughs! À bientôt from the Grammar Patrol!