Emphasis

Today we’re gonna talk a little about emphasis. Now, I already started to cover this in my last post. I ended up ranting about the use of all capital letters, though. In this post we’ll be taking a look at the individual ways you can add emphasis to your text, and talk about some best practices for each of them.

I’m told that people like lists so here’s a list of ways you can emphasize (or de-emphasize) in your text.

• Bold
• Italic
• Underline
• All caps/Small caps
• Font size
• Font Color

Alright, I’m pretty sure that covers it. You could also throw in exclamation points and parentheses, but I’m aiming to cover the things that actually modify the appearance of your text in this post. The goal with all of these things is to create contrast. You want to make the things you’re trying emphasize stand out. That sounds pretty obvious, but it’s important to understand as we go on.

The problem is that most people try to emphasize too many things. Amateurs will often bold large sections of text, and underline, capitalize, or italicize sections of text within that. The trouble there is that you’ve lost your contrast as soon as you bold a large section of text. Adding even more emphasis within already emphasized text doesn’t help and often only confuses your reader. That’s why it’s important that you use emphasis in your text sparingly. Usually, you can get a similar effect by simply adjusting your wording.

You should use effects like bold only when you think it is really important to point something specific. When you looked at this paragraph, you probably looked at the word “only” first, and then read the sentence which contained it.

Pointing things out in your writing like that should be used sparingly, and it’s good to have a maximum of only one or two emphasized words in each paragraph. Adding more gets confusing or overpowering. Even worse is when you have some things underlines, some things italic, and some things bold. It’s usually best to use emphasis minimally and only use one form of emphasis.

What kind of emphasis should I use?

That’s a good question. The kind of emphasis you use will depend on you medium and the kind of emphasis you want to create. In my mind, using bold is very similar to saying something a little louder and more sternly or passionately. Italics tend to create the appearance of someone very carefully pronouncing each syllable for added clarity. Underline is very similar to bold, but it should never be used on the web. All capital letters will create the the appearance of yelling, and should generally be avoided.

The rules?

I’m always hesitant to write these lists. I’ll attach the same conditions for these rules as I attach to all rules I post here. These rules can be broken if you have a good reason for doing so. They’re more like guidelines for when you’re not sure what you’re doing.

• Don’t combine types of emphasis.
• Don’t emphasize more than a word or two in a sentence.
• Always think twice before using type-modifications to add emphasis, there might be another way.
• Don’t use underlined text on the internet, it makes people think the text is a link.
• Avoid all capital letters.
• Always keep in mind that contrast is what you’re trying to achieve. More contrast = more emphasis (usually)
• Most people like to decide what they read first, taking that control away from them can be annoying.

That’s about all I can think of for now. Remember that if you have any questions, feel free to comment or contact me. I’ll do my best to help you out.