Gosh, you make it look so easy. And now that you reminded me that Normal is a paragraph style and Italics is font, I see your point exactly. Does that mean that selection.Style=X is only responsive to character styles? Or maybe assigning Normal to the selection.style makes the assignment but the assigned style won't override the font italics setting?

And for learning purposes (trying to understand the places where I went wrong), is there a difference between selection.InsertBefore and selection.text = "whatever"? In both cases wouldn't the "whatever" get inserted before the insertion point? Thank you