A "typeface" is a particular design of printing type; a "font" is a set of type, or a set of computer-generated characters, of the same design and style. Most computer word-processing programs contain a wide variety of different fonts. A great many of these are of little practical use for ordinary writing tasks. They are more likely to come into their own if you wish to make a document look as if it is handwritten or need a special effect, for example, if you are sending a greeting or preparing an advertisement or promotion. You should always use a simple, easily legible font for business correspondence, academic work, or text that you intend to submit to a publisher.Even if you use relatively plain fonts, you still have a choice. Fonts and typefaces are of two basic kinds: "serif" and "sans serif." A serif is a tiny projection attached to the top or bottom of a straight stroke forming part of a letter. Sans serif means "without serif." A serif letter looks like this: R. A sans serif letter looks like this: R.The differences between serif and sans serif appear slight, but a block of text in a sans serif font will easily stand out amidst a body of serif text, or vice versa:I wrote her a poem for her birthday and attached it to the freezer door with a magnet. My poem read: These are cold thoughts for a cold cold place,
The way you treat me's a disgrace,
I've grown to hate your lovely face,
So, goodbye, darlin'—oh, and happy birthday in any case. It was not a very good poem, but I was not feeling very poetic just then…. It is not, usually, a good idea to switch fonts frequently. Only use an alternative font to make a passage really stand out. There are other means of highlighting passages. It would suffice for an ordinary verse quotation to be "extracted," that is printed, as above, with a larger indent and a wider space above and below than ordinary text.RomanOrdinary upright characters in any font are known, technically, as "roman" (usually without an initial capital letter). Roman letters are used for the body text of almost all documents.One special use of roman letters is worth pointing out. When you are using roman as your basic font, you will probably use italic for special emphasis or for the conventional presentation of, for example, book titles and foreign words (as explained in the subsections below). If you are, for any reason, using italic as the basic font for a passage, then you reverse the process and use roman for highlights:Don Armado in Shakespeare's early comedy Love's Labour's Lost is another character afflicted with a curious folie de grandeur. ItalicItalic is generally used to highlight special features of the text, such as- words that you wish to emphasize
- words shown as words, or letters shown as letters
- foreign words
- special terminology
- the titles of works
- headings
Let us look at these items briefly.Italic Used for EmphasisWhen documents were mostly handwritten, it was customary to underline words that would be given a particularly heavy stress if they were spoken aloud. Although word-processing programs make it easy to underline words, it is much neater to show stress by putting the affected word into italics:Such action should only be taken on express instructions from the head of department. I do not believe there was any conscious intention to deceive. The use of italic is roughly equivalent to raising your voice when speaking. Rarely should a whole sentence, let alone a whole paragraph, be put into italic simply for emphasis. If you find you are resorting to italic frequently to convey emphasis, then you should rather think of recasting some of your sentences so that the emphasis falls naturally on the words to be stressed:Only on express instructions from the head of department should any such action be taken. Highlighted Words or LettersWhen you write a sentence such asThe word latitudinarian has seven syllables. it is customary to put the word that is being singled out and held up for inspection, so to speak, into italics. The same applies when you do not use the formula "the word(s)" as an introduction, but that formula is nonetheless understood:Both argon and krypton come from Greek. Compare that sentence with the following:Both argon and krypton are inert gaseous elements. The latter sentence says something about argon and krypton as substances; the former is simply a comment on them as words.Individual letters should likewise appear in italic when they are being highlighted:Young children often write the letter s backward. She spells her name with a (capital) K. You don't spell believe with a double e. If you have to pluralize a single letter shown in italic, show the s in roman:There are only two es in separate. But it is usual to ask someone to "mind their p's and q's."Foreign Words and Special TermsForeign words that have not been naturalized into English, or are not familiar to most English-speaking readers, are shown in italics.The French accused various other member states, especially the British, of being insufficiently communautaire. During the apartheid era, a member of the ruling National Party in South Africa who held more liberal views was commonly known as a verligte. It is not always easy to know what is and what is not a familiar or naturalized term. If a foreign word is printed in a standard English dictionary, then its use is recorded in a considerable number of English-language texts. In the second example, the word apartheid appears in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary and would in any case be familiar to most politically aware adults. The word verligte (meaning "enlightened person") does not appear in the dictionary, however, and would only be known to people who had studied recent South African political history, so it appears in italics. Perhaps more foreign words appear in standard dictionaries than are actually known to the public—for example, roman à clef, weltanschauung, and verismo (meaning "a novel that presents real persons or events in a fictional guise," "worldview," and "realism" [in opera], respectively). If you do not think that your intended readers will know the term and you are forced to use it, put it into italics. A better policy, however, is to find an English equivalent or provide an explanation.If you provide a translation or explanation of a foreign term, place it after the term in parentheses or quotation marks.The French accused various other member states, especially the British, of being insufficiently communautaire (community-minded). It is also normal practice to put a technical term or any unfamiliar term that is important for your argument into italics (or quotation marks) on its first appearance:Among geographers this process is known as glocalization. However, whereas foreign words should always be rendered in italics, special English terms, once they have, as it were, registered themselves with the reader, can then be shown in roman:Among geographers this process is known as glocalization. Glocalization is an unexpected offshoot of globalization and refers to an upsurge of production or community consciousness within a particular locality as multinational firms move their operations away from their traditional centers. Titles of WorksItalics are used to show the titles of books and plays:Scott Turow's The Laws of Our Fathers
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller the titles of long poems:Homer's Odyssey and of published collections of poems:For the Union Dead by Robert Lowell. The titles of individual shorter poems are set roman in quotation marks:"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou
Robert Browning's "How We Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix" The titles of articles in journals, periodicals, and newspapers are shown in roman in quotation marks; the titles of journals, periodicals, and newspapers are shown in italics:"FBI's No. 2 Was 'Deep Throat,'" written by David Von Drehler, staff writer for the Washington Post
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research HeadingsItalics are generally used for subheadings following a main heading that is shown in capitals or in boldface.BoldfaceThe Chicago Manual of Style and other style guides are not, in general, favorably disposed toward the use of boldface in text. It is not good practice, generally, to intersperse words in bold in a body of text. Bold is, however, useful for higher-level headings in printed texts and for headings in letters. It can also be useful in highlighting points in a list.
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