It is possible to lessin the text effects to get like slightly slanted text

I’m trying to get italicized text and when I go to text effects it looks good, and then I apply it and it stretches my text to unreadable length, and I didn’t see any option to get less of a slant rather than the max setting am I missing something?

I don’t love the text effects options and tend to use Inkscape to generate any customizations to the text…usually I’m doing text on a curve or circular text, but you might have better results there as well, doing your design in another software, saving as a SVG and then importing into Easel as a SVG…

IF you use inkscape (free) there’s a few steps to convert the text into a vector making it Easel compatible, shown here: