I’ve actually just broken an italics-using habit when writing fiction. I used to use italics all the time for emphasis and making it clearer how the text would sound if read out loud (it felt clearer to me, at least.) A reader commented that the software I used to convert my MS Word draft to an epub converted all italics to bold, and that he found it disruptive, and had tried mentally reading the lines with and without the bold and having the emphasis didn’t seem to make anything clearer. I used select-all on my MS Word document and removed all the italics in order to make him a new epub. Rereading scenes later, it turned out that my friend was right, and the lack of italics hardly seemed to make a difference. Now I don’t use them period. (Once I stopped using italics constantly, it felt odd to use them occasionally.)
Italics are not a matter of clarity, they are more like a poor man’s musical annotations. While it is often said that punctuation is a matter of placing pauses where you would if you spoke the sentence out loud, I believe that this is false; when reading out loud for an audience, whether it be a conference, a speech, a narration, one finds oneself placing pauses and emphasis in places where it would be awkward to do so by italics, bolds, points, commas, colons, semicolons, or m-dashes. Sure, when one is sufficiently attuned to a culture, to its turns of phrase and the ways people habitually emphasize things, one can use wording and phrasing to suggest the right way of reading. Being an amateur actor, I had to work with a scriptwriter who deliberately avoided doing that. You wouldn’t believe how hard it was to give it emotional consisntency and proper flow; one practically had to build the character from scratch!
As an amateur director, part of my process with every play is to type up the script, stripping out all the stage directions and line-reading notes, precisely because I want to build the characters from scratch. But I do typically put in my own notes for the benefit of my actors who don’t wish to do so (while encouraging them to ignore those notes and try different things if they feel right)
I’ve actually just broken an italics-using habit when writing fiction. I used to use italics all the time for emphasis and making it clearer how the text would sound if read out loud (it felt clearer to me, at least.) A reader commented that the software I used to convert my MS Word draft to an epub converted all italics to bold, and that he found it disruptive, and had tried mentally reading the lines with and without the bold and having the emphasis didn’t seem to make anything clearer. I used select-all on my MS Word document and removed all the italics in order to make him a new epub. Rereading scenes later, it turned out that my friend was right, and the lack of italics hardly seemed to make a difference. Now I don’t use them period. (Once I stopped using italics constantly, it felt odd to use them occasionally.)
Italics are not a matter of clarity, they are more like a poor man’s musical annotations. While it is often said that punctuation is a matter of placing pauses where you would if you spoke the sentence out loud, I believe that this is false; when reading out loud for an audience, whether it be a conference, a speech, a narration, one finds oneself placing pauses and emphasis in places where it would be awkward to do so by italics, bolds, points, commas, colons, semicolons, or m-dashes. Sure, when one is sufficiently attuned to a culture, to its turns of phrase and the ways people habitually emphasize things, one can use wording and phrasing to suggest the right way of reading. Being an amateur actor, I had to work with a scriptwriter who deliberately avoided doing that. You wouldn’t believe how hard it was to give it emotional consisntency and proper flow; one practically had to build the character from scratch!
As an amateur director, part of my process with every play is to type up the script, stripping out all the stage directions and line-reading notes, precisely because I want to build the characters from scratch. But I do typically put in my own notes for the benefit of my actors who don’t wish to do so (while encouraging them to ignore those notes and try different things if they feel right)