Because italic type is lower in legibility, this style is best used sparingly. Current practice indeed seems to correspond to this; italics are mostly used to emphasize special or newly introduced terms and for titles, but not so often for large bodies of text. It is widely acknowledged that italics are very useful for emphasizing individual words within a text (conspicuity) and, because of that, for facilitating interpretation of the message (readability). This facilitating function makes italic type an instrument of paralanguage; it cues the reader into interpreting a word or a sentence in a particular way. The following is an example.

- I would have told you, if you had been home earlier.

- I would have told you, if you had been home earlier.

- I would have told you, if you had been home earlier.

- I would have told you, if you had been home earlier.

Whereas some people might hesitate when asked to read the first sentence out loud, the other sentences would give no such delay. All three sentences containing an italicized term can be interpreted in just one way. This demonstrates the paralinguistic function of italic type, which will be discussed further in chapter 4.

McAteer (1992) has investigated where people expect emphasis in a text and where they would place it themselves of it was not provided. Italics were preferred over both bold type and upper case type to stress pronouns. Italics were attributed a contrastive role in text; that is, the content of the italicized term is often opposed to that of other words in the text and draws attention to the sentence as a whole and not just to the term itself.

Lastly, the distinction between true italic and electronically generated italic type should be noted, which is a concern unique to computer generated print. Electronically generated italic type is regular type that has been slanted by the computer to simulate the effect of the traditional italic type, whereas true italic type is an alphabet that has been designed separately from the regular style of a typeface. Figure 8 shows the difference between the two kinds of italic. Although no research seems to have been done on their relative merits, it can be said that electronically generated italic type resembles regular type more closely and is less like handwriting than the true italic. Perhaps this means that legibility of these quasi-italics is relatively high, but this possibility has not been tested. Of one other practical advantage we can be certain; electronic generation of italics has resulted in the fact that many Gothic typefaces are now also provided with slanted versions where this was not regularly done before. On the other hand, designers usually can not appreciate the quasi-italic style as much as true italics.

Figure 8:
Italic Type: electronically generated and true italic