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Using italics

When you’re typing on a computer, you can write some words in italics. These are letters that are sloping to the right, like this.

You can use italics for short phrases in a foreign language that have been adopted into the English language. For instance, the French words ‘fait accompli’ mean that something is a ‘done deed’. If you use them in an English sentence, you’d usually italicise them:

I fear that the sale is already a fait accompli.

Usually, you don’t need to italicise the punctuation marks just after a phrase that is in italics. So if the previous sentence had been an exclamatory sentence with an exclamation mark at the end, you’d leave the exclamation mark alone:

Using italics