Use italics for the titles of long works, such as books, newspapers, magazines, plays, films, and TV and radio programs. Use them also for works of art and major musical works, for words, letters, and numbers that you mention as themselves, for emphasis, for the names of ships and aircraft, and for foreign words.
There are many writing rules to learn. First come the rules of spelling, which can be a challenge when you learn English. Then there are the rules for capitalization and how to write numbers, and finally the standard rules for italics.
Spelling is one of the big things that everyone has to learn, but a spell checker, such as the Spell Checker, makes it much easier than it used to be. Also, with spelling, there is a right way and a wrong way to spell a word. The same is true for most rules of capitalization: there are rules, and they are standard.
Italics are more of a problem. There is basically one set of rules, but writers apply them in different ways, and some people do not use italics at all. So when you read, you see italics used inconsistently, which makes the rules harder to learn.
Titles of long works
The most important rule for italics concerns titles. The titles of books, magazines, newspapers, and plays are italicized when you type. If you write by hand or on a typewriter, underline them instead.
Part of the inconsistency may come from this difference: because these titles look different depending on what you write with, people see them handled in different ways in different places. Style guides also differ: AP style, which many newspapers follow, does not use italics for titles at all.
Here are some examples of titles that you should italicize:
- The New York Times
- The Wall Street Journal
- Sports Illustrated
- Entertainment Weekly
- Romeo and Juliet
- To Kill a Mockingbird
The title of a shorter work, such as an article, a poem, a song, or a single episode, goes in quotation marks instead. The secret of quotation marks explains their other uses.
Films and programs
The next rule concerns entertainment. Italicize the titles of films and of radio and television programs:
- Grey's Anatomy
- The Archers
- Star Wars
Works of art and music
The next rules are harder to remember, because they concern things that people write about less often.
Italicize the titles of major musical works and of works of art:
- Swan Lake (ballet)
- Mona Lisa (painting)
- The Thinker (sculpture)
Words, letters, and numbers as themselves
Italicize a word, a letter, or a number when you refer to it as a word, a letter, or a number, rather than using it for its meaning. The examples below show this rule in practice:
- One of her spelling words is biology.
- Is your name spelled with a k?
- Your handwriting is messy. Is that 1705 Main Street or 1106?
Emphasis
You can also use italics to stress a word or a phrase:
- They were going to the party that everyone always talks about.
Use this sparingly: if you stress everything, nothing stands out.
Ships, aircraft, and foreign words
Finally, use italics for the names of ships, aircraft, and spacecraft, such as the Titanic, and for foreign words and phrases that are not part of standard English, such as the German Gemütlichkeit. If a dictionary lists a borrowed word as English, write it in normal type.