No matter how often I preview, and move the words around, whenever I italicize something, it always ends up looking
like this. What can I do to make the italicized word look more separate from words around it, and not like it’s a part of them?
I admit I’m confused here. Do you want more space between the italicized word and the others? Or do you think mere italics doesn’t distinguish the word enough?
Your web browsere compresses spaces. If you include more than one space between two words, only one space will be displayed.
It’s a feature, not a bug.
HTML 4.01 Specification
I remember someone asking this before so I put it in the technical issues FAQ.
If you want a space not to be compressed, you can use the so-called “non-breaking space”. To use it, enter the following:
So for instance:
I want this word to be separated.
appears like this:
I want this word to be separated.
I’m fairly sure that this feature should be supported by all browsers.
Also, I should point out that in your original post, the italicized words do not look compressed with the words around them. What browser are you using?
Achernar, that “non-breaking space” is a cool feature that I didn’t know existed.
Thanks!
Wow–thanks, guys! I got home and saw that everything looked okay and thought “Geez, they’re gonna think I’m totally nuts.” Nice to know it’s just my browser. Thanks for telling me how to fix it, too. 
I also forgot to add that if the words seem too close when you use italics, it could be because of the font and/or font size used by the different browser.
FWIW, I have a similar problem with my fonts/browser. When someone uses the symbol font to display the TM symbol (you should use ™ instead, anyway), the beginning of the following text appears squashed into it.