Underlined Italics

Hello Lost World. This topic has come up before on AW, but the lowdown you'll get is essentially:

some people underline words meant to be italic in Courier font for ease of reading on the part of editors and agents. In TNR it's more visible but to my understanding Courier is still the norm. I don't think you're supposed to underline AND italicize. Just one or the other.

Ultimately, no one will disagree I'm sure, submission guidelines trump. Whatever you write will presumably change font, size, format, whatever else upon printing anyways.

TLO is right. Unless you have some reason to do otherwise, just underline what you want to be italics.

I believe the rationale is that it's easy for a typesetter to miss italics, especially some short words such as an.

If you submitting something as a Word file, such as for an online website, they will often state whichever way they want you to handle things such as this. Online publications often take your file and more or less post it directly to their website.

What I want to know is, what do you do if you want stuff underlined?

JimmyB27 said:

What I want to know is, what do you do if you want stuff underlined?

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You italicize it.

;-)




(just kidding!)

JimmyB27 said:

What I want to know is, what do you do if you want stuff underlined?

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Is there a purpose in fiction to underline words? Perhaps when making a list title or timestamp or something similar? Interesting point, though.

In the instances I've indicated just now, I would think it would be up to the editor whether to italicize, underline, slap a colon at the end or just give it its own space on the page as a header and have that be that.

Not the most knowledgeable about this though. Hopefully someone else knows better than I.