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army1987 comments on Rhetoric for the Good - Less Wrong
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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.