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Writing Skills

Brush up on your grammar and punctuation skills to polish your final drafts.

Italics

Italics is used in a variety of cases.

MLA Style

Titles of books, reports, webpages, and other stand-alone works

  • A Clash of Kings is my favorite book.

 

APA

First use of key terms or phrases, often accompanied by a definition

  • Paraphrasing is defined as "a restatement of a text, passage, or work giving the meaning in another form" (Merriam-Webster, 2023).

Titles of books, reports, webpages, and other stand-alone works

  • A Clash of Kings is my favorite book.

Titles of periodicals and periodical volume numbers (but not the comma between them)

  • American Journal of Nursing, 119(9), 47–53.

English letters used as statistical symbols or algebraic variables

  • d, M

Anchors of a scale (but not the associated number)

  • ranged from 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent)

First use of words, phrases, or abbreviations from another language when readers may not be familiar with them; however, if the term appears in a dictionary for the language in which you are writing, do not italicize it.

  • Their new catchphrase was et tu?