lettered: (Default)
It's Lion Turtles all the way down ([personal profile] lettered) wrote2006-03-06 04:06 am

Let's talk about word emphasis. And sundry.

G. TKP: I shaved my arm-pits.
TKMom: Cool. Let me see.
TKP: Look. (hooks index in t-shirt sleeve to reveal self.)
TKMom: They're so sparkly!
R. Got 4th rejection letter. Am waiting to get rejected to 3 more grad schools. Go me.
A. Writing month! It's a time to discuss how we write, why we write, what we write. DISCUSSION, it squeezes me up out of defjection from rejection (marvel at my rhyme) like a tight hug or one of those stress things, the ones you squeeze and have to keep grabbing hand over fist lest they slip from your hands entirely. It's about being constructive, and possibly positive, and gazing at our navels with shining, dewy eyes and wondering words that tumble from our mazed-parted lips in the form of, "I'm beautiful; I'm really beautiful!"

V. Er, the point of this post...

I've seen people use
bold font
*astrisks*
/slashes/
\backslashes\
-dashes-
_these thingies_
CAPSLOCK
"quotes"
'single quotes'
~are these things called tildas?~
=equals signs--no, really!=
underlined text

and much more in order to:

-emphasize a word or phrase
-signify a thought taking place in a character's head
-denote a flashback
-emphasize a word occuring within a sentence/phrase/whatever that's already italicized because it's a flashback or a thought

Me, I only ever use italics for these things inside a fic (what I do in my posts and comments is a completely different story to me). When I want to emphasize something occuring already inside an italicized phrase, I un-italicize the word I want to emphasize, as demonstrated above. I only use italics for these purposes for several reasons:

-this is the way I see it done in published fiction.
-uniformity, which is somewhat connected to the next to ideas, so I won't go into it that much. In short, the reader doesn't have to guess why I emphasized some words in one way and other words in another way, or try to decipher whether the different ways of emphasis connotate different levels of importance.
-if I need another tool besides italics to convey my meaning, my meaning is probably convoluted, and could stand simplification until I only need italics in order to make my point.
(e.g., in Down There In The Reeperbahn I really wanted the dialogue bits to occur with as little narrative background as possible, and thus I had a problem of signifying who was saying what lines. I ended up using italics to signify Dru's voice. If it was still unclear who was speaking, there was a problem with my concept, my dialogue, and my presentation, and those are things that can't be fixed by resorting to using other "signifiers" to denote other people talking.)
-how they look. Italics are subtle and don't call a lot of attention to themselves. For me, all those other things do. Bold, CAPSLOCK, and underline have a tendency to draw the eye. (When skimming my flist, I almost always read the CAPSLOCKED text, the links, and the cut title first, because the colors and size call attention to themselves. It's lead to me missing important information contained in the regular text.)
Asteriks, slashes, dashes, et al, not only call attention, but add something to the text that is not meant to be read. This bothers me a lot. I feel that everything in most kinds of fiction should be a part of the text. Asterisks used to emphasize a word are not things that we read, but visual clues that the words they enclose are important.

I'd like to note that I am a big fan of making text a visual experience. Poetry, notably through e e cummings and the like, uses the shape of words and the space on the page as part and parcel to the piece itself. Prose is a different thing, but I don't quite believe it when people say this is the difference. Reading is looking at marks on a page, whether prose or poetry, whether the text transports you to a new world or not.

As such, I love prose that experiments/does new things with space and those marks on said page. The first time I saw it done in prose was Toni Morrison's Beloved, in which she eliminated spaces between some words in order to produce confusionurgencypanic. I've seen some fic-authors use that same technique to extraordinary effect. And when it comes to this kind of experimentation, I feel there is no right and wrong. Pynchon uses mathematical equations in the middle of text, and even though I for the most part don't understand it, I fangirl the effort.

But when some fic-authors use *asterisks* merely to emphasize a word, it doesn't appear to me to be trying something new with space or text-shape or anything like that. It appears to me to be just another way to emphasize a word, and in a way I find distracting and detrimental to the look of the text as a whole. Bold or CAPSLOCK could be used very purposely to draw the eye--to trick the reader into reading in a non-linear fashion, which could, if the author is very clever, produce an effect the reader would not otherwise experience. But when some fic-authors use Bold or CAPSLOCK , again, they seem to be doing so only for word-emphasis, and again, in a way I find distracting and detrimental.

That said, there are uses for some of these styles other than word emphasis. Some are:

-underlining book titles.
-boldfacing titles of segments of the text (part one, part two, so on.)
-boldfacing a sign, or business card, etc. Some books seem to want to physically show you the business card or sign. The block of text saying what's on the card is usually indented and formatted to look like a sign. I usually stay away from this use; it falls into the category of "if I can't show this through regular text, there's something wrong with my writing, not my visual presentation." But, I've seen some authors do it, so there, exception to the "way it's done in published books" rule of mine.
-CAPSLOCKING a disembodied or really powerful voice. For instance, JKR probably wore out her capslock button on Book 5. I stay away from this use also, for the same reasons as above.
-"quoted" or 'single-quoted' words obviously have their place in text, but they shouldn't be used as italics are, imo. I'm told there's an episode of "Freinds" and Ross air-quoting "thanks" that could probably explain the difference.


Anyway, I've seen excellent authors I admire use many of these styles, especially boldface, CAPSLOCK, and *astrisks*. No matter who's writing it, it throws me out of the text. But that's me, my opinion, my way of writing, and my way of reading. What're your thoughts on the matter? How do you use these tools, if you use them? What do you think when you see them in text?
Y. "Cheekbones so unreal they must be sparkled with god-dust"...The lovechild of Kiera Knightly and James Marsters could split atoms with his cheekbones.
!. Mmm. Brains.

[identity profile] spiralleds.livejournal.com 2006-03-07 02:31 am (UTC)(link)
We used to refer to rejection letters as DINGs (Damn, I'm No Good). The self-depreciating humor seemed to help. :-p Good luck, break a leg and all that.


I try to hold it down to the occasional use of italics for emphasis. I've also 3used it for a character's inner thoughts when for whatever reason they couldn't speak, although now that I've progressed in my ability to write internal dialog, I'm not sure I would do that any more.

I used to post in a forum that didn't allow for html, so we'd use the stars around a word to convey bold and tilda for italics. In some ways, that was a good thing, because it really encouraged me to minimize my use of those techniques to get across whatever it was I wanted to emphasize, etc., which I think that often be a crutch that keeps a writer from being as strong as they could be.

[identity profile] stakebait.livejournal.com 2006-03-07 02:33 am (UTC)(link)
I have a big problem with quotes used for emphasis. Because quotes around a phrase mean something else, and I end up reading whatever it is as being said, which leads to some really bizarre misunderstandings.

I don't really mind boldface or underlining any more than italicizing, so long as I'm not expected to keep track of some complicated symbology of which means which. (Any story which must begin with a key to the typography has lost me at the author's note.) They're all reasonably standard forms of text formatting for emphasis that were out there in the world already. Italics is the way it's done in profic, but IMO italics is far more readable on the printed page than the screen, so I'm okay with these as non-eye-bending replacements.

*asterisks* and _underscores_ I have mixed feelings about. I have some nostalgia for them, since they were old skool Usenet formatting from when you couldn't make your italics and underlining show up. They're still useful for those getting text-only emails, and I am sufficiently used to them as to find them non-distracting.

On the other hand, most of us are reading and posting HTML now. And the use of asterisks (or double colons) to mean "action" in casual online interaction (such as *hugs*) can cause doubletakes.

Of all the non-standard forms of emphasis, *this* is the one I'm most likely to slip into, and use interchangeably with italics in fic. Though I wouldn't do it in a would-be pro story, even one submitted to an online market. I'm torn between thinking this is a lazy tick I should wean myself off of, and thinking that I find it easier to read on screen and I'm probably not the only one, so why not use it, where Industry Standards is not a consideration.

Capslock I really dislike because, per Usenet again, I read it as shouting. Not the character shouting, but the author shouting at me, the reader. Though if used *very*, I mean, very sparingly, it can be effective.

Tildes, equal signs, and slashes of either orientation just confuse me and tend to give me a headache, especially in densely packed text. And dashes I tend to read as em dashes -- the kind you might use to set off a paranthetical phrase -- so just around a word is a little odd, though not as brain-breaking as the others.
lynnenne: (lol by killmebecomeme)

[personal profile] lynnenne 2006-03-07 02:34 am (UTC)(link)
I am so purple I am eggplant

LOL! Best analogy ever. *loves you like mousaka*
my_daroga: Mucha's "Dance" (aces)

Wow. This armpit thing sounds momentous

[personal profile] my_daroga 2006-03-07 02:35 am (UTC)(link)
I don't think I use anything but italics in my fiction, and that only rarely. I could be wrong, but that's my memory of it. As for LJ, that's totally different, as you've probably noticed. Sometimes I format, but a lot of the time I'm lazy and do *this* instead; I was around back in text-only fan environments, and it feels natural and it's a lot quicker than all those tags.

But never in fic. If I ever wrote something with telepathy, I might. Or might not. Also, if I were to write something where the perspective changed but the chapter didn't for some reason, or I needed to tag the year/location, I'd bold it.

[and I loved those fake best actress commercials. Esp. the old guy who, as regards gardening, said sadly, "But it's all I have."]
lynnenne: (skewed world view by xanphibian)

[personal profile] lynnenne 2006-03-07 02:44 am (UTC)(link)
I really don't mind *asterisks* because they're a holdover from text-editor days, just like underlining is a holdover from the typewriter. I prefer italics, because that's what I'm used to seeing in books. But we tend to forget that, until fairly recently, it was impossible to get italics to show up properly--on the screen or the printed page--unless you had access to a printing press. It's all what you're used to seeing, really.
lynnenne: (booth by _wastedicons)

[personal profile] lynnenne 2006-03-07 02:49 am (UTC)(link)
The whole idea of the characters thoughts being transcribed in between the paragraph breaks of the story, in italics or between brackets or otherwise.

What about things that you want to insert into the story (e.g. lines from a song, or a quote from another author) which are not part of the characters' thoughts? I did that with "Vicarious," in which I inserted "The Prayer of St. Francis" into the narrative, using italics. A bit pretentious, I'll grant you. But in some cases, I think it can work quite nicely.

*ducks the foot of Fod*

/sigh/

[identity profile] imnotacommittee.livejournal.com 2006-03-07 02:50 am (UTC)(link)
I don't know about text emphasis, brain gravy, or cheek bones (aside from Kiera Knightly's being sprinkled with God-dust), but I do like those Edelweiss. Sorry to hear about the rejection letter. I have confidence (hehe) that one of those remaining three will see the light and accept you!
lynnenne: (help i've fallen by shopgirl2004)

[personal profile] lynnenne 2006-03-07 02:51 am (UTC)(link)
"But Doyle, you are my snuggle bunny," Angel said.

--which is how dialogue should be.


I'm sorry, but dialogue should never be like that. ;)

[identity profile] crazydiamondsue.livejournal.com 2006-03-07 03:30 am (UTC)(link)
Italics don't bother me a'tall, and I've used them frequently. Bold I haven't seen much - although I can see a case made for bold emphasis on a world that would be italicized in a sentence that's completely italized because it's thought or other. If one is cool with ital in the first place.

Asteriks are okay for LJ posts - but they would throw me out of a fic.

I overuse dashes in LJ posts, but I can only think of one fic (a stream of consciousness thing) I've written that was plagued by them.

The lovechild of Kiera Knightly and James Marsters could split atoms with his cheekbones -- Did you know that the Royal Shakespeare Company of Stratford, England, held a 2004 poll asking movie viewers to vote for the actor and actress they would most like to see in the roles of Romeo and Juliet? And the OVERWHELMING winners were Kiera Knightly and James Marsters? Why do I *know* this?
ext_7189: (Default)

[identity profile] tkp.livejournal.com 2006-03-07 03:31 am (UTC)(link)
Which embarrasses me terribly because I'm guilty of removing fic from the internet. In both cases, it was because I didn't plan to finish them and was no longer interested in the fandom...but gah, should've left them up, if only to gauge my learning curve. I'm going to repost them someday.

Can I call you baba ganoush?
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[identity profile] tkp.livejournal.com 2006-03-07 03:37 am (UTC)(link)
No, I don't think an MFA program is necessary. And what do I think I'll get out of one?

I think I'll get people paying me to sit on my ass and write.

Seriously, the programs I applied to are programs that pay your tuition and a stipend for living. Basically all you have to do is go to workshops and write and they PAY you to do it.

The reason I want to go isn't so much to learn as to buy time...or get paid time, as it were. Well, also, I work better under pressure. It's easier for me to finish my projects if I feel like I'm under some obligation that's more immediate than my desire to get published. Which is sad, but true. I know that if I want it bad enough I WILL finish things and go after publishing them, but I feel like grad school might be the kick in the pants I need. And I do feel like I'd learn a lot at grad school, but you're write, they're not things I couldn't come to know through writing on my own or joining local writing groups.

But maybe NOT getting into grad school is the kick in the pants I need after all. I guess if I don't get in I'll feel really pressured to finish something so I can at least TRY to get SOMETHING published/produced/whatever before I actually have to get a real job. I've got several things in the works...I'd say I have trouble with motivation, but I don't have trouble with motivation to WRITE, only to finish and stop starting new things.

Anyway, thanks for the advice. I think you have some great points that'll help get my ass into gear when I get those next few rejection ;o)
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[identity profile] tkp.livejournal.com 2006-03-07 03:42 am (UTC)(link)
Thank you for your kind words and thoughtful advice. As I was telling a2zmom below, I'm hoping to get into grad school more to give me time to write and possibly get me something published than to get an MFA or some kind of credential. Still, if I'm going to write I'm going to write...I'd be writing even if I spent the rest of my life waiting tables...so I shouldn't need a grad program to get me to do it.

I didn't know you were in publishing! I've been thinking if I don't get in to grad school, or don't get any of the things I'm working on recognized by someone who can pay me for it, I want to work in a publishing company and work my way up, as you say. I used to be really ambitious about it...I thought that even if I got published, I'd want to be in some kind of real career like publishing and editing or even cinema and all that. But for some reason, my ambition in the last 3 years just crawled into some place in me and died, and I find that really disturbing. I guess I need to rekindle it or I'll shrivel as well! Geesh! I'm such a whiner!

Thanks again!
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[identity profile] tkp.livejournal.com 2006-03-07 03:44 am (UTC)(link)
I think the trick is getting paid/supported while you do it. *grin*


Exactly!

And oh? Do you have grad school woes, too? Care to expound? *puts on coffee*

[identity profile] a2zmom.livejournal.com 2006-03-07 03:46 am (UTC)(link)
We could have wallpapered every room in our first apartment with hubby's rejection slips.

Which is why a sugar daddy (or momma) is a great way to go if you can find one.

Seriously, the main reason Aaron is not planning to go into the field of automotive writing (and he easily could - his website is a model of clear writing) is because of the pay. Or, more precisely, the lack thereof.
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[identity profile] femmenerd.livejournal.com 2006-03-07 03:52 am (UTC)(link)
Ahem, funny how I screwed up the code and made everything bold just as I'm saying that I hardly ever use bold type.

Hmmmm, I don't think I've ever used bold type in a fic with the possible exception of chapter titles.

In fact, the only one of these abuses that I persist in perpetrating is using the occasional *asterisk* and I honestly don't have a good excuse for myself.

I primarily use italics for interior thoughts (which I do because I tend to write in the third person limited POV and do have to delineate when it is an actual internally "verbalized" thought). And I have used italics to denote flashbacks/dreams but not in awhile. I also use them to emphasize words but I try not to do it too often as it lessens the impact.

The main things that throw me out of the reading experience are any kind of abbreviations/netspeak and bold type or caps. The former is just F-ing wrong unless you are writing some sort of crack!fic that involves people emailing each other and the latter two are just extremely jarring to my tender eyes.

I have issues with em dashes and the abuse there of. Just ask my beta [livejournal.com profile] amybnnyc. Heh. At least I've read the Chicago Manual of style and know the difference between a dash, an en dash and an em dash.

Oh, and I forgot that I do the words mashed together thing also (albeit sparingly), although I think that this comes from my background in German where one frequently encounters compound nouns. And when I do that, I tend to italicize the cumulative expression.

But now, I feel like I'm just listing off my own behaviors rather than contributing to this discussion in a meaningful way. Your post has made me think though--the full prognosis just hasn't become clear yet.

One thing though that you didn't mention--and I don't know if it entirely fits here--but which I think about often, is how people space their sentences and/or paragraphs. I think it's obvious that people who don't put a space between speakers in dialogue are trying to make me lose my mind. But I feel as though I tend to have a great deal more spaces in my fic and for me this has to do with rhythm and the way that I hear the flow of text in my head. And I suppose it is reminiscent of poetry as well. In my case, this probably happens a lot because especially in my short fics, they tend to be mood pieces more than they are strictly narrative. I think this is also related to the fact that I tend to write fic that is very closely aligned with one character and so the perspective is much more intimate and therefore more malleable.

Oh my, I think this ramble needs to end now. *g*
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[identity profile] tkp.livejournal.com 2006-03-07 03:53 am (UTC)(link)
"And what's this?" Spike asked, heavy weight on the last word, finger jabbing into Xander's rib for further emphasis.

See that, I think, is going to far. It still doesn't give "this" the punch you want it too, and when you have to begin specifying, drawing out specific words in dialogue, it ruins the most powerful thing dialogue has: it's the only thing in fiction that occurs in real time.

From Cordy's desk, the jelly donut she'd only half eaten oozed a sugary, artificial scent. The smell of burnt coffee made his nostrils itch.

What did I say about fic bits off the cuff? *applauds*

And the narrative would serve as thought.

Exactly--that is how I would do it. And I love when a minor detail can replace a thought. The tapping of a cigarette, the falling ash, the shadow of a cloud, a glimpse of red--vivid details can sometimes convey the thought or feeling with far more of a gut-punch than anything explicit, because then you don't know what hit you.

[identity profile] a2zmom.livejournal.com 2006-03-07 03:53 am (UTC)(link)
And the OVERWHELMING winners were Kiera Knightly and James Marsters?

That completely skeeves me. Give me 15 year old Olivia Hussey and 18 year old Leonard Whiting in the version I still consdier definitve.
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[identity profile] tkp.livejournal.com 2006-03-07 03:54 am (UTC)(link)
You're just jealous because you wish YOU had written that line.
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[identity profile] tkp.livejournal.com 2006-03-07 03:57 am (UTC)(link)
I like italics in that situation. Then again, I'm the one who wrote one person's dialogue completely in italics in a fic, so I'm no brace against the weighty foot of Fod.

There's a ring to that, isn't there.
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[identity profile] tkp.livejournal.com 2006-03-07 04:02 am (UTC)(link)
It's funny, because I was thinking about [livejournal.com profile] stoney321--and what I've seen of your posts--when I made the comment about some people's lj posts being rife with capslock, and how it's fine for posts but not for stories. Which of course, got me to thinking. COULD a fic be written in the zesty, impulsive stream-of-exburant-thought way people like you and stoney post?

That's me. As soon as I think "that would be bad" I think "hey! I wanna try it!" ;o)
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[identity profile] tkp.livejournal.com 2006-03-07 04:07 am (UTC)(link)
though more often I just de-italicize the emphasised word.

I do prefer this, though sometimes I wonder if it's really...noticable. If you want the word to pop, you want something about it to be different than ordinary text. But I stick to just de-italicizing because, as you say, the page can look busy with a bunch of these things going on.

And I will sometimes use specialty punctuation to indicate telepathy as opposed to regular speech--

I forgot about that! I HAVE seen that in published fiction...I think Mercedes Lackey used italics within slashes to denote telepathy/special communication. Or maybe it was colons?

And back when I was posting to non-HTML mailing lists a lot, I would use = to indicate "This would be in italics if I could do italics in this format, but I can't, so you'll have to imagine it."

Yeah, I totally forgot to mention that some of these conventions come from posting HTMLess. I totally used stars on lists and on ff.n back in the day before you could easily use italics. And while it kinda sucks, I have less of a problem with it when there's no other way to do it.

And completely with you on the using some of these things more than I should...I only use italics, but I know I overdo it.
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[identity profile] tkp.livejournal.com 2006-03-07 04:15 am (UTC)(link)
The first place I saw italics used for word emphasis was Catcher In The Rye. I was floored. I didn't know you could do that.

I think you're right about the boldface and some of McKinley's stuff...I seem to remember that too, because it threw me out when she did it. I have a big problem with it...but that's me, also, how my eyes are drawn to things, etc. As someone below states, it has a lot to do with how you're used to seeing things.
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[identity profile] tkp.livejournal.com 2006-03-07 04:20 am (UTC)(link)
Oops! I forgot to mention that. I meant to...after all, I've used asterisks a good deal in the past when HTML wasn't available to make my stuff look how I wanted it to.

I agree that emphasis should be used judiciously, and that it's a wonderful tool. However, my personal experience has been that certain visual expressions of it may have different effects than the author intended.
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[identity profile] tkp.livejournal.com 2006-03-07 04:29 am (UTC)(link)
If you did use bold and I got to beta it I'd probably tell you not to! I'm so picky!

I think I'm going to do a whole post about dashes. I completely agree about people not letting each other finish in really conversation. I tend to use them far too often in narrative speech as well. But my biggest issue with dashes is there are two different kinds, and then the hyphen, and some people use them interchangeably. I've always thought this to be incorrect, but I haven't brought it up most times when I beta for you or others, because I'm not sure of my facts. Perhaps if we have a big fandom discussion we can figure out what the real deal is. OMG collective hive mind yay!

And hi! I hope work is easing up on you a bit, and that you're doing ok. Kim didn't die but I think there's still hope.
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[identity profile] tkp.livejournal.com 2006-03-07 04:31 am (UTC)(link)
Right now I have a sugar daddy AND momma--my parents! Omg, I need to get out!

What's automotive writing?

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