The genre of texts that puts italics around words like that is sleazy online sale websites. I remember someone writing on LessWrong a while ago that using italics like that is a tell for crackpot writing.
Is this actually true? I don’t think I’ve found this to be true (and it’s the sort of thing I notice, as a designer).
Here’s type designer Matthew Butterick, in his book Butterick’s Practical Typography, on the use of italic and bold:
Bold or italic—think of them as mutually exclusive. That is the rule #1.
Rule #2: use bold and italic as little as possible. They are tools for emphasis. But if everything is emphasized, then nothing is emphasized. Also, because bold and italic styles are designed to contrast with regular roman text, they’re somewhat harder to read. Like all caps, bold and italic are fine for short bits of text, but not for long stretches.
With a serif font, use italic for gentle emphasis, or bold for heavier emphasis.
If you’re using a sans serif font, skip italic and use bold for emphasis. It’s not usually worth italicizing sans serif fonts—unlike serif fonts, which look quite different when italicized, most sans serif italic fonts just have a gentle slant that doesn’t stand out on the page.
Foreign words used in English are sometimes italicized, sometimes not, depending on how common they are. For instance, you would italicize your bête noire and your Weltanschauung, but neither your croissant nor your résumé. When in doubt, consult a dictionary or usage guide. Don’t forget to type the accented characters correctly.
(There’s also a paragraph demonstrating overuse of emphasis styling, which I can’t even replicate on Less Wrong because there’s no underline styling on LW, as far as I can tell.)
So using italics for emphasis too much is bad, but using it at all is… correct, because sometimes you do in fact want to emphasize things. According to Butterick. And pretty much every style guide I’ve seen agrees; and that’s how professional writers and designers write and design, in my experience.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong to put italics around some words. The OP violates both rules 1 and 2.
It has sentences like:
Everyone, everyone, literally everyonein AI alignment is severely wrong about at least one core thing, and disagreements still persist on seemingly-obviously-foolish things.
As far as #2 goes, well, presumably the author would disagree…? (Click on the Practical Typography link I posted for an—admittedly exaggerated, but not by much, I assure you!—example of what “overuse of emphasis” really looks like. It’s pretty bad! Much, much worse than anything in the OP, which—aside from the combination of bold and italic, which indeed is going too far—mostly only skirts the edges of excess, in this regard.)
Anyway, my point was primarily about the “sleazy online sale websites” / “crackpot writing” association, which I think is just mostly not true. Sites / writing like that is more likely to overuse all-caps, in my experience, or to look like something close to Butterick’s example paragraph. (That’s not to say the OP couldn’t cut back on the emphasis somewhat—I do agree with that—but that’s another matter.)
I agree the highlighted sentence in my article definitely breaks most rules about emphasis fonts (though not underlining!). My excuse is: that one sentence contains the core kernel of my point. The other emphasis marks (when not used for before-main-content notes) are to guide reading the sentences out-loud-in-your-head, and only use italics.
My recommendation is to use bold only in that case. Bold + italic is generally only needed when you need nested emphasis, e.g. bold within an italicized section, or vice-versa.
Is this actually true? I don’t think I’ve found this to be true (and it’s the sort of thing I notice, as a designer).
Here’s type designer Matthew Butterick, in his book Butterick’s Practical Typography, on the use of italic and bold:
(There’s also a paragraph demonstrating overuse of emphasis styling, which I can’t even replicate on Less Wrong because there’s no underline styling on LW, as far as I can tell.)
So using italics for emphasis too much is bad, but using it at all is… correct, because sometimes you do in fact want to emphasize things. According to Butterick. And pretty much every style guide I’ve seen agrees; and that’s how professional writers and designers write and design, in my experience.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong to put italics around some words. The OP violates both rules 1 and 2.
It has sentences like:
Yep, that definitely violates #1, no argument.
As far as #2 goes, well, presumably the author would disagree…? (Click on the Practical Typography link I posted for an—admittedly exaggerated, but not by much, I assure you!—example of what “overuse of emphasis” really looks like. It’s pretty bad! Much, much worse than anything in the OP, which—aside from the combination of bold and italic, which indeed is going too far—mostly only skirts the edges of excess, in this regard.)
Anyway, my point was primarily about the “sleazy online sale websites” / “crackpot writing” association, which I think is just mostly not true. Sites / writing like that is more likely to overuse all-caps, in my experience, or to look like something close to Butterick’s example paragraph. (That’s not to say the OP couldn’t cut back on the emphasis somewhat—I do agree with that—but that’s another matter.)
I agree the highlighted sentence in my article definitely breaks most rules about emphasis fonts (though not underlining!). My excuse is: that one sentence contains the core kernel of my point. The other emphasis marks (when not used for before-main-content notes) are to guide reading the sentences out-loud-in-your-head, and only use italics.
My recommendation is to use bold only in that case. Bold + italic is generally only needed when you need nested emphasis, e.g. bold within an italicized section, or vice-versa.