Desrtopa comments on Rhetoric for the Good - Less Wrong

49 Post author: lukeprog 26 October 2011 06:52PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (289)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Desrtopa 27 October 2011 09:13:27PM 2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: lythrum 27 October 2011 09:19:03PM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: dlthomas 27 October 2011 09:29:58PM 0 points [-]

Presumably it would be easy enough to strip out of everything (online) with a tiny bit of css voodoo.