Dissertation formatting: should foreign words and Latin abbreviations be italicized? In English language non-fiction books, it used to be common that foreign words were italicized, including abbreviated Latin words and phrases: op. cit., et al., ceteris paribus, ex post, and so on.  In books published in the last 20 years, I notice that this convention is less common and, instead, most books use plain text for foreign words.

Question: Should foreign words be italicized in a dissertation (field: Computational Social Science)?  Can you think of a good reason for not doing it?

In my opinion, using italics for these is both helpful to readers and appropriate for a dissertation.  I'm inclined to adopt this convention.  Since I'm using LaTeX, it is easy for me to do, so there is no issue of extra work or inconsistency.

Our university formatting requirements for dissertations are silent on this and many other detailed issues.  My adviser has no opinion, other than that he wants 100% consistency.



Context: I am already going above and beyond the minimal dissertation formatting requirements.  All my cross-references are active hyperlinks.  I have a full glossary. I have customized URL formatting so that the are visually nice and don't distract from surrounding text (e.g., in bibliography).  In this context, italicizing foreign words is a very small matter.  I'm posting a question here because I'm genuinely curious about what other people do and their opinion of whether this formatting convention adds value to any reader, not just my committee.
In general, unless your particular institution's style guide has something to say on the matter, this is entirely up to the author to decide. The primary reason not to do so, I think, would be that there are so many foreign words that it becomes impractical to italicize them all (in other words, the italicization becomes too prominent).

Additionally, one can make the argument that over time foreign words appear enough in a foreign language that they end up "borrowed" by the other language. For instance, if I were writing in the humanities, I'd be inclined to italicize Weltanschauung but not schadenfreude or angst.