I'm not sure I understand the question.

When I'm writing fic, I am writing in HTML. In fact, I am so accustomed to using the HTML tags that it's trickled down into my everyday writing, with occasionally embarrassing results.

With some HTML codes that are more complex, like colored text and indentations, I have text shortcuts in my word processor that I can invoke so I don't need to remember the entire tag.

I have found, especially for longer stories, that the Visual Editor really creates a lot more problems than it's worth (it also adds about 20% more characters to your posting file than using the HTML editor).

Is this helpful?

I do what you suggest for shorter fics, but for longer fics I prefer seeing the formatting. So I guess my question is as follows:

If I want to use actual italics when writing, is there a way to turn them back into HTML tags before posting?

Ah! You want a Word to HTML converter! There are a number of on-line tools:

http://www.textfixer.com/html/convert-word-to-html.php

I don't endorse or recommend because I haven't used it, but it's what came up in a Google search for Convert Formatted Text to HTML.

You'd think, with all the bells and whistles in Word, they'd have a conversion tool, too!

Ooh! This works perfectly, thank you so much!

Word does have a conversion tool, but it keeps all the bells and whistles too, like font sizes etc.

Ah! S, good to know. I'm not surprised that the Word tool clutters everything up.