Author: Jennifer De Leon

Greek textbooks

To italicize or not to italicize? Authors speak up on the use of ‘foreign’ words in prose (Part II)

Sometimes when writing, I hover the cursor over the I symbol in the Microsoft Word toolbox for several seconds as I grapple with whether or not to italicize a word or a phrase in Spanish. It is in such moments that I am faced with broader questions about my work that deal with audience, privilege,…

up-close photograph of a keyboard

The Borderlands of Language: Using Italics for “Foreign” Words (Part I)

Junot Díaz once told me that he writes for his six best friends and the rest of the world.  This was a few summers ago in a VONA fiction workshop in San Francisco. We had been discussing the meaty issue of how much to explain in our short stories and novels. For example, would the…