Bad books and fan fiction

Jul 29, 2010 11:13

Independent of one another, thankfully.

I signed up for kamikazeremix. This ought to be interesting.

Usage/typographic conventions question: Italics for non-personal name proper nouns like band names and restaurants in RPF--is this some convention borrowed from entertainment reporting? I’m seeing it in RPF a lot. Did it come from bandom maybe? I can’t lie, it ( Read more... )

reviews, au: niven, au: lichtenberg, au: yeffeth, au: gerrold, fan fiction, au: crusie, other tv, nonfiction, au: gilman, fiction

Leave a comment

Comments 2

veejane July 29 2010, 19:21:20 UTC
Italics for non-personal name proper nouns

I don't know nothing about RPF, but that sounds very like Page Six, yes. It also tends to bespeak a low opinion of one's readership, no? That they cannot be arsed to read a whole story (fiction or news), and will only scan to find out whether their own/their fave bolded names are there.

Reply

rivkat July 29 2010, 19:24:51 UTC
I don't know about that--if I'm correct about the derivation, I think it's an inappropriate use of a technique that might make sense if readers are scanning a newspaper looking for items of interest to them, moving it to a context where we expect readers to be reading sequentially. I don't think it's necessarily a low opinion of newspaper readers to think they may be reading functionally. But it is weird to transport the technique to somewhere that the underlying rationale does not cover.

Reply


Leave a comment

Up