Italicized Words in a Manuscript: I specialize in non-fiction articles for consumer and trade magazines and prefer the Chicago style. How best to indicate italicized words and phrases in a formal manuscript? Are they underlined, set in quotes, or is an italicized font the way to go? Lastly, what are some good online sources for manuscript style guidelines? Thanks.
Chicago Manual of Style is used quite a lot for nonfiction manuscripts. But I don't know of any publisher who doesn't accept the underline as standard to indicate italics in print (that's either with or without an italics font in the manuscript itself). Reason is (1) that it's easy to overlook italics if that's all that's used in the manuscript, and (2) the underline is never (or rarely) used in print (and that's why it indicates something other than itself). You would not use quotation marks (or any other piece of punctuation, really) to indicate italics, because quotation marks (and other kinds of punctuation) are routinely used in print for very particular reasons (so that would be confusing to the person who's publishing the manuscript in which they appear). If your publisher is online, you should check their guidelines in case they have other ways of indicating various font styles (like using asterisks and such). This usualy relates to conversion issues and ways of avoiding miscues that result from certain formatting styles that might not show up when block-copied into an e-mail transmission, e.g. P.S.: CMoS is on-line, too. Maybe they have a section that relates specifically to on-line submissions.
Good question. Don't you just do it like normally, by hitting squggily I, or is there some specific informational format you have to follow? I am now curious on this...
what do you mean by 'squiggly I'? as noted above, the standard way to indicate italics is the underline the words you want to see italicized in print...
I think you're referring to a keyboard device the typist uses to generates italics (either on the screen and/or to print out in a hardcopy manuscript). I think what the OP is looking for is whether an italics font is actually an acceptable way of indicating to a publisher that something should be italicized in published print (it isn't). It needs the underline (probably "squiggly U" or something like that) to indicate to the publisher that the passage is meant to be italicized when it goes to print. Plus, there are other ways of indicating various typesetting preferences that get lost in translation from one program to another, especially when something is block copied from a particular program to include in an e-mail submission where they want submissions embedded within the text of the e-mail. (I've seen underscores & asterisks and other stuff requested by various on-line publishers. But their individual guidelines usually cover those matters.)
if you meant the 'slanted' ['squiggly' means something else] i icon on the tool bar, that's right... when you click on that, the text will be italicized... but you should not use that for mss to be submitted, as the underline is still universally acceptable and more easily seen, no matter what font you're using... btw, the underline icon is neither 'squiggly' nor slanted, it's just a u with a line beneath it...
