Originally posted by LaurenW:
Re: italics, lots of authors have been using asterisks over the years in lieu of italics. And all kinds of symbols to represent things like thoughts (though in printed material that's usually italics too). It makes the story look a little more interesting, formatting-wise, to use italics. Carol's story was short, so making the switch was easy. With longer stories, I gave up!
/nods knowingly/
And it certainly doesn't help that formatting something using italics in Word and for posting on the boards are two very different things, thus making it quite impractical to create the source with proper italicization.
On a similar note: for practical purposes (basic ASCII characters only plus because it looks better in plain text) a lot of stories get submitted to the archives with their nice, typographic quotes replaced by the generic ASCII ones. Another potential nightmare to get those back
Michael
