Consulting Journal: Writing

Writing: Emphasis

by David Blakey

How to emphasize text in reports.

[Monday 21 August 2006]

There are six ways to emphasize parts of your text.

Bold

We recommend that you should not continue with this project. We have calculated your financial exposure could be up to seven times the total project budget.

Italic

We recommend that you should not continue with this project. We have calculated your financial exposure could be up to seven times the total project budget.

Capitalization

We recommend that you should not continue with this project. We have calculated your financial exposure could be up to seven times the total project budget.
We recommend that you should not continue with this project. We have calculated your financial exposure could be up to seven times the total project budget.

You can now choose between upper-case, as in the first of these two paragraphs, and small-caps, as in the second. I prefer small-caps, so we shall use that as our example from now on.

Colour

We recommend that you should not continue with this project. We have calculated your financial exposure could be up to seven times the total project budget.

Underlining

We recommend that you should not continue with this project. We have calculated your financial exposure could be up to seven times the total project budget.

Unfortunately, underlining can also indicate a hyperlink. Someone who is reading your report online will probably only want hyperlinks to be underlined. For this reason, I shall not continue with underlining.

Size

We recommend that you should not continue with this project. We have calculated your financial exposure could be up to seven times the total project budget.

I think that changing the font size looks ugly. It also does not give much emphasis, unless the size is significantly bigger than that of the surrounding text. Then it will look even uglier. Changing the size may also change the spacing of the lines, which is also ugly.

Choices

That leaves four choices: bold, italic, capitals and colour. We could try combinations of these.

	bold	italic	capitals	colour
bold		like this	like this	like this
italic	like this		like this	like this
capitals	like this	like this		like this
colour	like this	like this	like this

I think that bold and italic work well with each other but not with either of the other two.

Colour and capitals provide a strong emphasis, so I might consider using them in some rare situations.

You should make your own choices.

	bold	italic	capitals	colour
bold		like this	like this	like this
italic	like this		like this	like this
capitals	like this	like this		like this
colour	like this	like this	like this

Now I have five general choices: bold, italic, bold-italic, capitals, andcolour. I also have colour-capitals for very strong emphasis.

Kinds of emphasis

There are really two reasons for emphasizing text. By the way, I have not yet seen any book on style that describes them. I shall describe them and you can decide whether you accept them.

Imperative emphasis

The first kind of emphasis I have called imperative. This is the emphasis that reinforces an instruction or recommendation. It is intended to make sure that there is no misunderstanding, as in We recommend that you should not continue with this project. Usually, a bold font will convey this. The brief for your assignment may have been to determine the viability of the project. If you have discovered that the project is not viable, then a bold font for not will work well.

On another project, your brief may have been to confirm the viability of the project. If you have discovered that the project is not viable, you will make a recommendation that will contradict your brief. In this instance, you may want to use a stronger emphasis: We recommend that you should not continue with this project

Circumstantial emphasis

The second kind of emphasis is circumstantial. It reinforces the circumstances. It can confirm that the circumstances are as expected or it can deny that they are.

When it confirms the circumstances, this kind of emphasis provides a kind of relief. It acts as a cheer-leader: Everything is fine!.

When it denies the circumstances, it acts as a warning: Beware!.

Using the choices

You can use the choices you have to differentiate between the two kinds of emphasis. I tend to use an italic font only for circumstantial emphasis.

We recommend that you should not continue with this project. We have calculated your financial exposure could be up to seven times the total project budget.
We recommend that you should not continue with this project. We have calculated your financial exposure could be up to seven times the total project budget.

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