Italics

Italics are used for the following purposes:

• drawing reader's attention to a word or phrase in your writing.

• defining terms.

Example italic use

A discourse community is a group of people who share common technical vocabulary, such as programmers using terms like truncated, concatenated, and string.

As the italicised words look different from the main font, the reader will notice them more easily.

As a writer, you are intentionally saying "Look at this".

Caution

Avoid overusing italics. As writers, you are trying to draw attention to specific parts of writing.

If everything is in italics, that reader attention is lost; we are saying "Everything is important", when it isn't.