Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Use of italics should conform to Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Text formatting § Italic type. Do not use articles ( a , an , or the ) as the first word ( Economy of the Second Empire , not The economy of the Second Empire ), unless it is an inseparable part of a name ( The Hague ) or of the title of a work ( A Clockwork Orange , The Simpsons ).
Double emphasis, such as italics and boldface, "italics in quotation marks", or italics and an exclamation point!, is unnecessary. Underlining is used in typewriting and handwriting to represent italic type. Generally, do not underline text or it may be confused with links on a web page. [f]
These cases are well-established conventions recognized in most style guides. Do not apply italics to other categories or instances because you feel they are creative or artful (e.g. game or sport moves, logical arguments, "artisanal" products, schools of practice or thought, Internet memes, aphorisms, etc.).
True italic styles are traditionally somewhat narrower than roman fonts. Here is an example of normal and true italics text: Example text set in both roman and italic type. In oblique text, the same type is used as in normal type, but slanted to the right: The same example text set in oblique type
"Italics are for contrast; roman gives a contrast from italics just as italics normally give a contrast from roman.": This is about the sound-system standard promulgated by George Lucas's company; for his similarly named film, see THX 1138. "Italics are for emphasis; emphasis within an emphatic sentence is achieved by strong emphasis.":
I'd go with #2 in the first example and #1 in the second example. The full name of the course is a proper noun and should be capitalized. In the second example, you're describing the classes and not using the courses' specific names. For a named speech ("I Have a Dream"), I'd put it in quotes and I suppose that could be extended to a named lecture.
The question of italics for titles of major works in non-Latin scripts has come up before, for example Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Text formatting/Archive 6#More clarity may be needed re titles of works in foreign languages, a discussion that concluded 20 June 2018.
It's just a short-cut combination of italic and the math font. It's used a lot in math, since all usual variables|math variables are italic and serif both . For folks not conversant with mathematical typesetting rules, it probably seems like fluff, even though for us inside mathematics, the ubiquitous use of an italic serif font for most (but ...