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Word emphasis

RC turtle

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I remember reading somewhere a long time ago that a writer should not use bold or italic type, but instead use word choice to convey what is important in a sentence. Does this apply to fictional dialog?

It just doesn’t seem realistic to me to expect all my characters to choose their words carefully.

How do you use/not use bold, italics, etc? and
What do you think of Capitalizing words for emphasis like we do in texts and such?

(I am not proposing actually doing so; I'm just doing a lot of transcription right now, which leaves me thinking about such things.)
 

Bufty

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The only thing wrong or to be aware of when using italics in fiction is overuse. Use them very sparingly indeed.

Of course your characters (or you on behalf of your characters) should choose their spoken words carefully.

It's fiction- cut out all the ums and ahs and ers and waffle/rubbish folk use in everyday conversation. 'Realistic' conversation can be boring, and the last thing you want to do in fiction is bore your reader. 'Believable' dialogue is the aim.

Dialogue is one of the most powerful tools in your story tool box. Pick every word carefully and make every word count. That way, chances are you won't need any italics at all.

The best way to master dialogue is to read it.

Any help?
 

indianroads

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For emphasis I use italics in dialogue, and single quotes in description.

Jane hated the term 'just friends', but that seemed to be the relation she had with Dick.
Jane glared at him. "We're not just friends, I want a relationship!"

Whatever you decide to do and use consistently will probably work, but as Bufty suggested, use is sparingly. If everything is emphasized, nothing is.
 

RC turtle

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For emphasis I use italics in dialogue, and single quotes in description.
This makes sense. I think in dialogue I'm also tempted to use bold if it's something they'd say louder.
It's hard to be consistant when you can't even remember (or articulate) your own rules.
 

RC turtle

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It's fiction- cut out all the ums and ahs and ers and waffle/rubbish folk use in everyday conversation. 'Realistic' conversation can be boring, and the last thing you want to do in fiction is bore your reader. 'Believable' dialogue is the aim.

Is there a balance here with giving characters their own voice? I find if I'm too careful I start to sound like I'm lecturing or something. Without an occasional tongue-glitch, characters don't seem real.
 

Maryn

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What works for me--and I've posted about it before, although I didn't save a copy--is to italicize a stressed or emphasized word only when a lack of emphasis changes the meaning of the sentence.

It took me a long time to realize that it truly didn't matter if the reader hears every line of dialogue that way I do in my head. So long as they understand every line, I'm doing my job.

But there are indeed times when, lacking italics, what a character means when they say a line is uncertain. In those instances, I use italics freely.

Maryn didn't fly to Las Vegas. (But someone else did.)
Maryn didn't fly to Las Vegas. (Never mind what people think she did.)
Maryn didn't fly to Las Vegas. (She got there some other way.)
Maryn didn't fly to Las Vegas. (Maybe she only flew back.)
Maryn didn't fly to Las Vegas. (Maryn went somewhere else altogether.)

Sentences like that require the italics to read properly. But these sentences don't, even though this is how I hear them in my head:

Oh, fine, do it your way.
I never said I would go with you.
You'd better not be telling Mom.
I hate you like I hate demons!
Seriously, your favorite color is beige?

All of those sentences have exactly the same meaning whether the word I italicized is stressed or it isn't. So I don't.

Overuse of italics is among the many things that once marked me as an amateur. One down, a bazillion to go, right?

Maryn, who sells once in a while
 
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Bufty

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Is there a balance here with giving characters their own voice? I find if I'm too careful I start to sound like I'm lecturing or something. Without an occasional tongue-glitch, characters don't seem real.

Yes. Each character should speak differently in some way, whether it's sentence construction, word choice, repetition of a particular word or phrase etc,. People from different places or backgrounds have different manners of speaking and sound different from each other.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'being too careful'. 'Careful' simply means think about the dialogue and how the character would say it - what words and construction would that particular character use? You know all their backgrounds. Nothing wrong with an occasional tongue glitch if that particular glitch identifies a particular speaker.
 

mccardey

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I remember reading somewhere a long time ago that a writer should not use bold or italic type, but instead use word choice to convey what is important in a sentence. Does this apply to fictional dialog?

It just doesn’t seem realistic to me to expect all my characters to choose their words carefully.

How do you use/not use bold, italics, etc? and
What do you think of Capitalizing words for emphasis like we do in texts and such?

(I am not proposing actually doing so; I'm just doing a lot of transcription right now, which leaves me thinking about such things.)

I try not to. Your bolded 'realistic', I would have stressed in my own head anyway. The bolding - seeing it as somebody else's reading - threw me right out.

Maryn has the right of it. Italics perhaps, but only if not using them allows for certain misinterpretation.

If you've built your characters in your own head, they will sound the same when you write them down.
 
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Sonya Heaney

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I remember reading somewhere a long time ago that a writer should not use bold or italic type, but instead use word choice to convey what is important in a sentence. Does this apply to fictional dialog?

It just doesn’t seem realistic to me to expect all my characters to choose their words carefully.

How do you use/not use bold, italics, etc? and
What do you think of Capitalizing words for emphasis like we do in texts and such?

I use italics for emphasis. It works for the way I write, and I've not been called out for it. To me, telling someone to "just pick better words" sounds a bit … snobby?

However, I'm pretty sure my publisher wouldn't let me put things in bold, and capitalisation was used a lot more in the past than it is now.

There's so much advice out there about how you "should" write, and I choose to ignore a lot of it. Firstly, because there are a lot of armchair experts with nothing but opinions to back up their ideas. Secondly, because what is okay in one type of writing might not be in another.
 

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I remember reading somewhere a long time ago that a writer should not use bold or italic type, but instead use word choice to convey what is important in a sentence. Does this apply to fictional dialog?

It just doesn’t seem realistic to me to expect all my characters to choose their words carefully.

No, it isn't, though even dialog is generally not written exactly the way people talk with all the fillers, fragments, and mid-stream changes in sentence focus we are all "guilty" of in real-world speech. Ever watch closed captioning on TV, or even more excitingly, had to close caption a lecture or demo you recorded for a class (as I just did recently with our switch to online teaching)? It really demonstrates how even professors, diplomats, and journalists don't speak the way they write. I had no idea I started so many sentences with the word "so," for instance, or said "All right" so often, or sometimes trailed off without finishing a sentence, or changed what I was going to say mid sentence. Some of it is I'm not used to verbally describing a lab process while doing it and being recorded, but even polished, practiced people do these things more than characters generally do in dialog. Things look worse in writing than they sound in speech.

But this doesn't mean you shouldn't use vocabulary that makes sense for your characters, and for the narrative viewpoint, and for the narrative voice etc. You absolutely should. It also doesn't mean you aren't "allowed" to use italics for tonal emphasis.

"I didn't know he would want that one" has a very different feel than "I didn't know he would want that one."

I suppose you could write, '"I didn't know he would want that one," Tom said, emphasizing the word "that."' Maybe some writers prefer to do it that way, but it isn't better to do it that way.

I wouldn't over use italics for emphasis, any more than I'd overuse adverbs, adjectives, fancy dialog tags etc., but there is going to be a certain subjectivity when it comes to assessing how much is "too much."' Some people hate using any of these things ever, and find ways to write just fine without them. A few of these people (some are successful writers) insist everyone should write the way they do, but the fact that plenty of other successful writers don't write the same way probably means this advice can be taken with a generous handful of salt.

Bold facing and capitalization seems to be much used less in trade-published fiction for emphasis than italics. I've seen capitalization used for when a character is shouting, generally in juvenile or YA fiction, though. Shouting isn't the same thing as emphasizing a word within a sentence.

Generally, when I've seen bold face used in fiction it's when the author is denoting what a character is reading on a sign or something, but I can't say it's very common, IME.
 
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RC turtle

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I was mostly refering to things like Maryn’s Las Vegas examples - yes, there are definitely ways to say those things without italics, but real people rarely do. If I get all fussy with word choice instead, my characters seem to stiffen.

I have found that stressing the way the dialog sounds to me is not so necessary. Just have to make sure the meaning can't be too badly mistaken, I guess.
 

angeliz2k

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Unless you have a grip on it and exactly what you want it to accomplish, use emphasis sparingly.

You run the risk of emphasizing something differently than how your reader would emphasize it in their own heads. Different people and people speaking in different dialects will emphasize things differently to get across the same message. That's why it's important that, for the most part, the message should be clear without the emphasis. Otherwise, it might be jarring. I've come across passages where something is emphasized to make it sound "angry", but in my head, while I heard the words as "angry", I wasn't emphasizing the words the author had emphasized.

That being said, there are likely to be places where you need to emphasize a word to ensure the meaning is getting across. Saying "I don't want to do that," is different from, "I don't want to do that." Even so, our knowledge of the character and situation should tell us whether the person is being petulant about doing the thing or is objecting to doing that particular thing.

Basically, proceed with caution.

Of course, I think you can get away with more in dialogue and/or more voice-y exposition.
 

benbenberi

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Boldface is not normally used within published fiction except as a header of some sort. Take a glance at a hundred professionally published novels and if you find even a single instance of bold to emphasize anything it would be astonishing. Lesson: don't do it.

As for italics... the urge to use italics to indicate emphasis in dialog or narrative is often very similar to the urge to provide a lot of stage directions for the characters -- all their smiles, nods, shrugs, squints, gestures, etc. It indicates that you, the author, have a very clear idea what they're doing and how they're speaking, and you want the reader to experience the scene in exactly the same way. If they don't, it means you have failed to tell your story properly.

The problem with that is, you can never put your version of the scene precisely into anyone else's head. No matter how detailed your stage directions, descriptions, and dialog transcription, it all gets filtered through the reader's mind anyway, and you have absolutely no control of what else is in there or how they will interpret what you give them. You can't even make them pronounce the names correctly. You may think you have written your characters & dialog so clearly that no one can possibly imagine it any way other than what you intend -- but guaranteed, someone will. Probably a lot of people.

But you know what? In most cases, it doesn't really matter. The characters I see and hear in my head when I read may look and sound completely different from the ones you were thinking about when you wrote. If I'm a neuro-divergent person who does not "see" or "hear" anything in my head when I read it, my experience of the scene is even more different. But the meat of a story rarely depends on these things. Where it's really important to you that readers attach certain details to characters, you have to repeat those details many times in many ways to make sure they stick.

Think of it like a playwright. You write the script... but then you have to hand it off to a director and actors and stage designers, who will bring it to life for the audience. Without them, the script is just flat words. They may bring things to the production you may never have imagined. But that's a feature, not a bug. For example, watch five or six different productions of Hamlet -- there are probably twice that number easily available, many of them very fine work. Or just listen to them. The line readings are all very different. But Shakespeare's play is still the thing. In fiction, you write the text, but your reader provides all the rest of the creative team. Your scenes are dead without them.

TL;DR: unless it's really, truly essential to dictate how a character performs a line, and it very rarely is, don't bother with italics. Accept that you're in a collaboration with every reader and you don't have a telepathic interface, and just focus your effort on the many other elements of storytelling that actually are in your control.
 

Curlz

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It just doesn’t seem realistic to me to expect all my characters to choose their words carefully.

What do you think of Capitalizing words for emphasis like we do in texts and such?

Have you read a book where the above are used? Just curious.