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antigonus comments on Rhetoric for the Good - Less Wrong
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Avoid overuse of italics. Try to write so that the reader can intuit where the emphasis goes.
Do you find Eliezer's writing particularly annoying in this way? I always thought one of the most recognizable aspects of his work was the unusually large amount of italics. (I also always thought it was a positive aspect, so I'm interested in your perspective.)
If you read a lot of Eliezer, the italics gradually seem less important, and add just a light accent to the word. If you read any "normal" text and then an italics-heavy piece by Eliezer, it feels like he's speaking really slowly and sometimes loudly to a child.
(I'm exaggerating, of course.)
Not sure it's a good idea, at least when writing in English. Spoken English resorts to intonation for stuff where other languages use word order, emphatic particles, etc. Writing already throws most of that away, and I can see no point in going further and throwing away all of it.
I don't think italics should be thrown away, but there are so many ways of expressing contrast in written English that render the use of italics superfluous. More often than not, having decent English composition and arranging your ideas in a logical order will automatically make the contrasts evident. I guess I get peeved when an author assumes I can't pick up on his distinctions, but maybe it doesn't bother you.
I would read the intonation of your last sentence differently if the italicized pronouns were not italicized. So if you actually meant to have that strong an emphasis on them, then the italics aren't superfluous.
I also would have read it differently in my mind without the italics. But consider that maybe the emphasis on "I" and "you" in the spoken version would be there in the first place to elucidate the opposition that comes across more easily in writing. It's difficult to be sure, but I don't think the I/you-emphasis version gives any extra information that's absent from the non-italicized written version.
Dunno how I would have read that sentence if the italics wasn't there. Damn hindsight bias!
No, really. Whenever I read two different wordings for the same statement to decide which is better, my perceptions of them interact in a weird way, so I'm not sure at all which one would sound better to me if I hadn't seen the other one. Also, I seem to be affected by some form of priming effect whereby the wording I've read first tends to sound better, unless a long time (at least one day) passes.
I strongly agree. I find Eliezer's italics so off-putting that I avoid reading his writing in formatted text. I don't know why, and I'm sure not everyone has the same reaction, but excess italics just make me twitch.
Well, I can affirm that I, at least, don't have the same reaction. Also I use italics similarly myself. I treat it as a mark of emphasis by the authorial voice. I don't mind having a textual marker to show me where the emphasis is, preventing me from having to intuit it, any more than I mind hearing people's emphasis when they talk, rather than having to intuit it as I would if they were using a voice synthesizer. The idea of finding it offputting is weird to me.
Yes, I'm aware it's not universal. I can't really explain why it's so bothersome - it's similar to occasional words being in a bright colour, or someone poking me every so often while I'm trying to read. It's probably a pity because, combined with my laziness, it just means that I avoid reading writing with lots of italics. If I'm feeling particularly motivated I'll modify the text to remove all the italics before reading it.
Presumably it would be easy enough to strip out of everything (online) with a tiny bit of css voodoo.
I don't find it off-putting, but it does make me feel I'm reading Lewis Carrol.
What's wrong with that?
It's slightly disconcerting to imagine some of the writing coming from the pen of an Anglican deacon.
Interesting. I usually find they break up the monotony of a large block of text, and help me identify how the passage should flow.
Italics seem pretty useful for conveyiong additional subliminal information to me. More common seems to be lazily using them too little.