Italics In Your Story

Italics are slanted letters that can be used for a variety of purposes in writing. Back when manuscripts were written by hand or typewriter, it was common for authors and editors to manually underline words or phrases that should be italicized later on by the typesetters. This was a matter of expediency—typewriters didn’t have italic letters, and it’s generally difficult to tell apart italicized handwriting from normal handwriting. These days, however, computers have rendered underlines almost entirely redundant, since writers can simply italicize anything that needs to be right from the start.

Italics have several handy uses:

Emphasis: This is perhaps the most common use of italics in stories. When people converse, they use all sorts of variations in their tone, pitch, volume, and pronunciation to convey subtle nuances of meaning. Using italics to indicate that a speaker has emphasized a particular word is one method writers have of mimicking these otherwise un-type-able subtleties of speech. Italics can completely alter our understanding of a character’s frame of mind and intent without changing the story’s wordcount at all. Compare, for example, this line of dialog:

     “I can’t believe you did that!”

with this line of dialog:

     “I can’t believe you did that!”

It’s the exact same line, but it has two different meanings. Such is the usefulness of italics. Be warned, however, that too-frequent use of this trick will grow tiresome—try to only use it when the emphasis is really important, just to be safe.

Marking foreign language: If you use a foreign language in your story, it is common to italicize the word or phrase in order to highlight that it is, in fact, another language, rather than an unfamiliar or appropriated English word. This is applicable whether the foreign language is a real-life language or one you’ve created for your book. Once you’ve italicized a word once, you generally don’t need to italicize it again if you don’t want to. Examples:

     “One of my favorite words in Russian is pochemuchik. It literally translates as ‘why-ling,’ referring to a child that constantly asks the question, ‘Why?’ I have a pochemuchik of my own at home, and it’s nice to have a succinct word to describe him.”

     The sorceress raised her hands and shouted in the language of magic: “Durakin lo-tuma fei!”

Marking words referred to as words: A word is simultaneously two things—it is the item, person, creature, action, trait, or concept that the word represents, and it is also a simple word. For example:

     The castle loomed over the tiny town, always covering the villagers in its shadow.

Or:

     The word castle has six letters.

See what I mean? In the first example, we’re speaking of the concept that the word castle represents; in the second example, we’re talking about the word itself, the collection of letters before our eyes. In such cases, as you can see, it is common to italicize the word to distinguish it from the concept it represents.

Note: the same applies to letters referred to as letters (the letter A).

Titles: The titles of books, movies, television shows, radio programs, plays, operas, ballets, long poems, long musical pieces, podcasts, blogs, comics, comic strips, newspapers, magazines, journals, paintings, sculptures, photographs, and other works of art or prose should be italicized. Basically, if it is something that someone has created and given a title, that title should be italicized.

     In many issues of Batman, you can see that Bruce Wayne’s parents were killed as they were leaving a showing of The Mark of Zorro.

Yes, this is from Batman/Superman, not Batman. It's all I could find, sorry.

 There are only a few exceptions to this rule: the names of websites (other than blogs or online journals), generic titles of musical pieces (such as Nocturne in B Major), and titles of older works of art whose creators are unknown (such as the Venus de Milo) are not generally italicized.

Note also that the names of individual portions of a work of art, such as book chapters; episodes of television shows, radio programs, or podcasts; and articles in newspapers, magazines, journals, or blogs should be placed in quotation marks but not italicized. The titles of short works should be treated the same way, such as short stories, most poems, and songs.

The names of ships: Be it a boat, an aircraft, or a spaceship, its name should be italicized: USS Alabama, the Nautilus, Hindenburg, Serenity, the Millennium Falcon.

Sounds: This is an often-missed use of italics. Onomatopoeia—any words intended to represent sounds—should generally be italicized:

     His head hit the floor with an unsettling crack.

     A deafening whirr filled the room.

Character thoughts: While italics aren’t the only way to express direct character thoughts, they are one of the clearest:

     It doesn’t matter how clear I am, she always misunderstands, Katya thought. But she said nothing.

To indicate dreams or other unrealistic settings: Italics are an unusual but occasionally useful method of setting apart one section of the story from another, usually when the italicized section is a non-real sequence of events such as a dream or vision. Terry Brooks used this method in his novel Running With The Demon to highlight the prophetic dreams of one of his characters. The only problem with this method is that some people really have trouble reading entire sections in italics, so use this sparingly.

Formatting a Manuscript

Last time I mentioned that repeated formatting mistakes can quickly cause an editor to lose interest in a manuscript. But what exactly does a properly formatted manuscript look like?

The basics

     One-inch margins

     Times New Roman or Courier New font

     Twelve-point font size

     Double-spaced lines

     Left-aligned text

     Running header in the top right corner of the page: Your Last Name / Story Title / Page Number

     Indent first line of each paragraph (either with tab or page formatting)

     No line breaks between paragraphs

Formatting the beginning of your story

How you format the beginning of your story will depend on the type of story. For short stories, your first page should have your name, address, and email address in the top left corner (unlike the rest of the document, these lines should be single-spaced. Place an approximate word count (round to the nearest hundred words) in the top right corner.  The title of the story should be centered on a line somewhere between a third of the way and half way down the page. Do not bold, underline, italicize, or increase the font size of the title. Put a byline (by your name) one double-spaced line below the title. Begin the story one double-spaced line below that. Omit the running header (last name / story title / page number) from this page. The end result should look something like this:

For longer stories such as novels and novellas, you’ll want to begin your manuscript with a title page. A title page will have the title of the story centered on a line somewhere between a third of the way and half way down the page. (Again, do not bold, underline, italicize, or increase the font size of the title.) Place the byline one double-spaced line below the title. At the bottom of the page, insert your name, address, and e-mail address in the left corner and the approximate word count (rounded to the nearest five hundred words this time).  Omit the running header from the title page.

The first page of the story should have the number of the chapter (Prologue or Chapter 1 along with any actual title you might have given the chapter) centered on a line somewhere between a third of the way and half way down the page. Again, do not bold these, etcetera. Begin the story itself about four to six double-spaced lines below the title. Include the running header on this page, beginning with page one. The end result will look like this:

Other formatting elements

Limit the amount of all-caps words that you use—there might be situations where you need them (say, if you’re Terry Pratchett and someone is having a conversation with Death) but most of the time they distract from the story. The same goes for bold letters. Unless you’re writing non-fiction essays or articles with sub-headers (as I am right now), you probably don’t need it.

Never use bold or all-capital letters for emphasis. Use italics instead, as I just did. (Note: if you’re using the Courier New font, italics can be difficult to pick out. In that case, you might want to consider underlining text that would have been italicized. Never use underline for anything else. Never.)

To indicate a section break, use a single asterisk (*), three asterisks (*** or * * *), or a number sign (#) centered on its own line. Don’t put any extra line breaks above or below the symbol.

At the end of the story, you may center “The End” or “###” on its own line if you so wish. This can be especially helpful if your ending is more open-ended (i.e. vague, unresolved, or sudden) so that the editor can be sure that this was, in fact, the end of the story and they didn’t just lose or accidentally delete any pages.

A final note

Editors do tend to be a little forgiving when it comes to formatting, especially in electronic submissions. There’s just so many ways to format a manuscript, and no one quite agrees on what is best. Just try to make sure that your formatting is close to what I’ve described here, and you should be fine.

However—always check the submission guidelines of the publication, editor, or agent to whom you are submitting. Sometimes they’ll have specific requirements listed. Always follow these requirements. If it was important enough for them to mention, they won’t be happy to see that you ignored their directions.

This is especially important when it comes to the type of document they require. Microsoft Word saves files as a .docx file these days, but many publishers prefer that submissions be saved as some other type of document, such as .doc, .txt, or .rtf. Make sure that you’ve submitted the proper document type.


P.S.
For a great run-down on formatting a short story (most of which applies to longer manuscripts as well), check out William Shunn's guidelines here.

Formatting for Publishing: Find and Replace

A subtle way to polish up your finished manuscript before sending it to a publisher is to do a few quick “find and replace” runs.  There are a lot of little formatting errors that crop up in a manuscript while you’re working—some are simple mis-types, some are the result of editing, and others can be the consequence of opening a document in multiple programs (Microsoft Word and Google Docs, for instance). Most of them can be easily fixed en masse.

Open the “Find and Replace” window by hitting Ctrl+H in Microsoft Word or Google Docs (command+shift+f and command+shift+h in their respective Mac versions). If you’ve never used “find and replace” before, it’s simple—whatever combination of characters you type in the first text box will be replaced by the combination of characters you put in the second text box. You can change each instance one at a time or all of them en masse.

Image from creativelycheap.com

A note of caution: it is very easy to create new errors with the mass “Replace All” option. For instance, say you’ve written a scene where one of the characters is using a pen. You decide afterward that you want them to be writing with a pencil instead, so you do a “Replace All” to replace the word pen with pencil. Unfortunately, the “Replace All” option has now substituted pencil for every instance of the letters pen. Open had now become opencil, pensive is now pencilsive, and so forth. So use this carefully.

Here are a few easy clean-ups that you can use to make your manuscript more presentable:

     Find:                                                       Replace with:

     Repeated spaces ([space][space])           Single space                      

If you need an indent, use paragraph formatting or tabs. Repeat this replacement until you get 0 results.

     Find:                                                       Replace with:

     Repeated paragraph breaks (^p^p)         Single paragraph break (^p)

Most “Find and Replace” features recognize a “carat p” (^p) as a formula representing a paragraph break. If you need space between paragraphs use the “add space after” feature in paragraph formatting. Repeat this replacement until you get 0 results.

     Find:                                                                    Replace with:

     Space at beginning of paragraph (^p[space])      Paragraph break (^p)

Or if you used tabs for the indents at the beginning of your paragraph:

     Find:                     Replace with:

     (^p^t[space])         (^p^t)

The ^t indicates a “tab” in most programs. This replace ensures that your paragraphs will all be aligned properly. If you’ve already replaced all of the repeated spaces, you shouldn’t have to run this replacement more than once.

     Find:                                                                       Replace with:

     Space at the end of a paragraph ([space]^p)          Paragraph break (^p)

This is very minor clutter, but there’s no reason to leave it.

     Find:                                                      Replace with:

     Repeated periods (..)                             Single period (.)

Note: if you format your ellipses as three periods (…), this will cause trouble. That’s one of the reasons I format my ellipses with spaces (. . .) instead. If you don’t have spaces in your ellipses, you’ll want to replace repeated periods one at a time (using “replace” and “find next” instead of “replace all”).

     Find:                                                    Replace with:

     Comma and period (,.) and (.,)            Comma (,) or period (.)

This is another that you’ll have to replace one at a time, since it’s the only way to ensure that you’re putting in the correct punctuation. Fortunately, there probably won’t be many of these in your manuscript. They usually crop up were a large section of a sentence was deleted but the old punctuation was missed.

     Find:                                         Replace with:

     Apostrophes ( ′ )                       Apostrophes ( ‘ )

Note the difference between those two apostrophes—one is straight, and one is curved. The straight apostrophe is an artifact of older typing programs or some non-text-focused programs that appears from time to time. If you’re using Word or Google Docs, however, the program will automatically replace each old-fashioned straight apostrophe with a curved one that faces the correct direction. (Note that you don’t have to hunt for an old straight apostrophe to put into your “find” box. Just put an apostrophe, and the program will figure it out.)

     Find:                                         Replace with:

     Quotation marks ( ″ )                Quotation marks ( “ )

    

Same thing—old-fashioned “double-prime” straight quotation marks should be replaced with curved ones.

     Find:                                          Replace with:

     Double hyphens (--)                  Em dash (—) or (^+)

Double hyphens aren’t actually proper punctuation—you’ll want an actual em dash in there instead.

     Find:                                         Replace with:

     Repeated tabs (^t^t)                  Single tab (^t)

Note: if you have used tabs as indentation, and you have any sections that indented further than the rest of the document (quoted passages, for instance), this could mess them up. It might be wise to replace these one at a time.

Now, I’m not saying any of these tips will get you published. They will, however, help you polish out a few common errors from your manuscript. This will result in a more professional-looking submission, which is an important step toward getting published. Good luck!