Imagine looking for a style every time you needed to italicize a letter. Body text, italicized. Header, italicized. Subtitle, italicized.
Why not let the user italicize, and then let Word itself find the style? Because that's what happens behind the scenes. If you italicize some Header 2 text, Word will create a new style "Header 2 + Italics." If you italicize some more Header 2 text, Word will reuse the existing style.
You can actually open the styles palette and decide to change all "Header 2 + Italics" to be boldface instead of italicized.
Word is a styles-based word processor internally. All the ad-hoc formatting you do gets turned into an anonymous style.
Why not let the user italicize, and then let Word itself find the style? Because that's what happens behind the scenes. If you italicize some Header 2 text, Word will create a new style "Header 2 + Italics." If you italicize some more Header 2 text, Word will reuse the existing style.
You can actually open the styles palette and decide to change all "Header 2 + Italics" to be boldface instead of italicized.
Word is a styles-based word processor internally. All the ad-hoc formatting you do gets turned into an anonymous style.