I'm writing a bio for a friend, and I mention many hotels and restaurants, some of which are foreign. Should I use italics?
Learn English – Do I use italics for hotel and restaurant names
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In books, you often see the italics used to distinguish when something is said mentally, instead of out loud. Sometimes italics are also used for flashbacks.
In advertising, I suppose you could use italics to make people ponder the quote more, irrespective of whether the quote is said out loud, or only thought internally.
Oakland A's fan: This is going to be your year.
In the first of your two examples, the first part ("A man said the other day") and the second part ("Why are all the trees orange?") get treated "evenly" by the human eye, and the quotes "clutter" the visual.
In the second example, the eyes are drawn toward the italics, and the first part seems more incidental. I can see why advertisers would prefer this format.
In general, I think the quote should begin with a capital letter. As I showed in my example, there should be punctuation before the "quote" – but it needn't always be a comma.
Style guides differ on how to render film titles. The Chicago Manual of Style, for example, recommends using italics, whereas the AP Stylebook recommends using quotation marks. However, I can't think of any style guide that recommends using either italics or quotation marks on first mention but neither on subsequent mentions.
I have seen books that use boldface or (more often) boldface italics for the first mention and simple italics thereafter, but in that case the boldface is being used to signify "first mention" and italics to signify "film title."
With regard to your comment that "over-use of italics would spoil the flow of the text," my view is somewhat different from yours. Once an author has established the practice of using italics to identify film titles, I find it distracting to encounter the title in plain roman type later on; to me, switching from italics for film titles on first occurrence to no special treatment for them on subsequent occurrences amounts to underusing italics, just as including quotation marks on first occurrence but then dropping them on subsequent occurrences would amount to underusing quotation marks.
Once you've trained your readers to recognize that you are using italics or quotation marks indicate a film title, I don't think that you need to worry that applying the convention consistently will be distracting to readers or in any way harmful to the flow of the text.
Best Answer
I would say no. Here is a quick guide on the correct usage of italics. To summarize: Don't use it for the proper noun. They example they give for a restaurant: if you write about a certain dish you ate that might not be commonly known, italicize it, but do not italicize the restaurant name.