I'm grading a pile of papers and I keep finding myself writing the same annoying sentence on Works Cited pages: "Do not mix italics and underlining in the same document; pick one and use it consistently." As often as I'm called upon to make the comment, it would be helpful to have it on a rubber stamp. The problem crops up in all my classes, from freshman composition to upper-level literature courses, and I see it on papers written by intelligent students just as often as the mediocre. I suppose mixing italics and underlining is a fairly minor problem compared to, say, failing to formulate a thesis and support it with evidence presented in clear, coherent prose, but still, when I see a Works Cited in which some of the titles are underlined and others are italicized, it's like fingernails on a blackboard--it makes my brain cells scream.
I have tried to educate students about the origin and development of italics, how in the old days when dinosaurs roamed the earth and people had to write out important documents longhand or on a typewriter, italic print simply was not available to the average person, so underlining was used instead. Today anyone can italicize, and they do so wantonly and promiscuously--italicizing here, underlining there, and sometimes (gasp!) doing both at the same time.
Frankly, I'm a little tired of the whole topic. An easy solution would be to outlaw italics--round up all those little left-leaning letters and haul 'em off in handcuffs until they learn to behave. But then I would loose upon the unsuspecting public a generation of students who believe the only way to get italics right is to leave 'em out. Wouldn't it be better to teach students to apply critical thinking to their typographic choices?
That's the approach I've taken so far, and it's clearly not working. I've been writing it all semester and it looks like I'll be writing it for a while longer: do not mix italics and underlining in the same document.
Where's that rubber stamp when I need it?
7 comments:
What about citing a play in a collection?
Linney, Romulus. Holy Ghosts. _Six Plays_.
Oops: italics lean right, not left. Um, well, ahem: left-leaning sounds better. Could go back and change it, but...nah.
To respond to jaywalke's question: the MLA Guide does not address this issue sufficiently, but the MLA Style Manual does. In section 6.6.7 (pp. 163-4), MLA offers both a rule and an exception.
The rule: the title of a work in an anthology should be enclosed in quotation marks, while the title of the anthology should be underlined.
The exception: "if the work was orignally published independently (as, e.g., autobiographies, plays, and novels generally are)," then you underline both the title of the individual work and the title of the anthology. Thus, in your example, both the play's title and the collection's title would be underlined.
Play titles look silly underlined. Perhaps the MLA is silly.
Grad school is certainly going to be fun.(1)
1. Ibid.
2. What's an ibid?
3. I think it's a bird.
4. Why's he going on about birds?
5. Who cares? Let's write some fiction.
Is it a spotted or herbaceous ibid? MLA allows you to italicize herbaceous ibids but not the other kind.
Just here to say glad Inside Higher Ed linked to you; I've been enjoying reading so far. Anyone whose main worry in the classroom is how to avoid singing "Moses supposes..." gets my highest respect.
I believe you about the MLA, oh mighty EB, but I still think there are cases where mixing italics and underlining makes sense.
I just finished a paper on Romulus Linney (obviously) where I referred repeatedly to his adaptations of novels to plays, so there are different works with the same title in the same paper. A Lesson Before Dying and Going After Cacciato (underlined) referred to the novels, while italicizing the same titles referred to the plays. It saved me a lot of clauses.
We could make a song. "If italics is wrong, I don't want to be. Write!"
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