it would help if you could post some of the code you're working with, but from what i understand of your question, you could assign styles to the children (<p> tags) of a container (a <div>) to save yourself some typing:
css:
Code:
.myDiv p {
text-indent:0;
font-style:italic;
}
html:
Code:
<div class="myDiv">
<p>Some Text</p> <!-- this will have the styles from .myDiv p -->
</div>