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lythrum comments on Rhetoric for the Good - Less Wrong
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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.