Editing w/o Text Edit

I understand how to text edit in a document..I think . However, while writing an e-mail in my local cable provider's system there is no obvious way to italicize words or make them bold and I tire of capitalizing everything. Can Snow Leopard help? Or am I a dinosaur and there are new ways, i.e. faces, symbols, abbreviations that signal emotions now? Still, I'd like to know how to do this task.

It sounds like you are attempting to use a web client for email, so if that's the case they either offer the option to style text in replies of they don't. If they do, I imagine it would offer a style bar like the compose window I'm writing in right now does. So I can italicise things and even bold them if I want to, using the style bar or just hand-writing the codes.

If by chance you are using Mail, the built-in client for the Mac, you can certainly do italic, bold, colors and other stuff by simply making your message "rich text" under the "format" menu in the menubar.

Once you've selected that, highlight a word you've already written and hit command-b for bold and command-i for italic. You can also select command-t to bring up the Type menu which will have ways for you to underline, change color and other such things.