I've been working on a long-ish manuscript (130 pages) using Word 2011 for Mac on a MacbookPro (still on Yosemite). The manuscript has 196 endnotes. The problem is that the titles of books that I have italicized (manually) do not "stick." Over and over and over again I have to re-italicize the titles. This has become a major problem because I have to constantly re-proof (and correct) the endnotes. I'm wondering if setting up a "character style" and applying it to the titles would make the italics stick better. Thoughts? And if I should go that route, how would I do it? I am using many different paragraph styles, but I've never used character styles.

Ideas?