Comments on: Smooth Harold mailbag: Italicizing quotes?

By: Jo

Jo — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 05:48:23 +0000

Thanks, Blake! I appreciate your putting this matter out there and your thoughts on it. I’ll try that with my spreads and see where it takes me.

By: Tyson

Tyson — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:14:30 +0000

In legal writing, you see a lot of block quotes. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_quote. That said, I don’t think that block quotes are a good way to provide emphasis. Generally, people just skim over them (if they read them at all).

I disagree that italics are improperly used to emphasize words or phrases. If anything, people need to stop using bold and underlining to emphasize. Italicization is certainly preferred. My recommendation is to italicize only the words within the quotation marks and not the quotation marks themselves. Italicized quotation marks just look funny.

If possible, only emphasize part of the quoted material: “For example, I hope that this emphasis, is what stands out in this quote.” While I’m rattling off my wish list, I also wish that the U.S. would follow Britain’s lead and start putting punctuation marks that are not part of the quoted material after the closing quotation mark.

By: Sara

Sara — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 15:14:48 +0000

Italicizing text is terrible for usability! Terrible! Sadly, the organization I work for italicizes copy too often, and I’m not in the position to change it all. :(

I do know, though, that usability research indicates that italicizing text is not the way to go, if you want your information to be accessible to all users. The best way to emphasize a portion of text is by chunking properly and calling out text like you suggested, Blake.

No italics!