Easy on the formatting

Writers convey their ideas mainly through word choice and word order—“the best words in the best order,” to borrow Coleridge’s dictum about poetry.

One thing the explosion of the Internet has created is a demand for content that cannot be met by the available professionals. This demand has had to be filled by untrained writers, which has led to a lot of mediocre writing. Mediocre content serves its purpose in some cases, such as on social networks, but it detracts from the user experience in most other cases, particularly with news, blogs, and commercial websites.

One giveaway of mediocre writing is when the writer uses formatting marks, such as capital letters and quotation marks, to draw attention to certain words. The intent is to emphasize a point to the reader but ends up being distracting or even confusing. Here are some formatting marks to avoid:

Capitalization

Writers sometimes capitalize the initial letters of words to make a phrase seem more important: “Wikipedia relies on User-Generated Content to expand its coverage.” “User-Generated Content” might seem to warrant capital letters. But just because a term is frequently used or important to the point you are making does not mean capital letters will make it stand out. Capital letters are usually reserved for proper names (such as Wikipedia); using them otherwise will probably only confuse your reader.

Quotation Marks

Bethany Keeley writes the very funny “Blog” of “Unnecesary” Quotation Marks to show how overused quotation marks are. As one of her examples—“Easy” financing available—shows, inserting quotation marks where they’re not needed implies that you don’t really believe what you’re saying. Reserve them for when you’re directly quoting someone or actually don’t believe what you’re saying.

Underline

Not too many writers underline for emphasis, thankfully. Underlining is conventionally used on the web to indicate links. Used otherwise, it’s an eyesore.

Bold

This one is acceptable—in moderation. Readers tend to scan online content, rather than read top to bottom, and so bolding text can be useful to highlight keywords. It’s also useful for search engine optimization (SEO); Google and other search engines pay slightly more attention to bolded text when they rank websites. But bolded text does not fit the style of every website; and, like anything, use it too much and it loses its effect.

Italics

Italicized text affects a website’s search engine ranking as well, but it can also interfere with the reader’s understanding of your meaning. Grammatically speaking, italics are useful for putting emphasis on one or two words in a sentence when there is a good chance the reader will misread it. Thus, “the director realized she should have halted production,” if you want to emphasize that the director didn’t always think so. Using italics more than that defeats their purpose and makes text hard to read.

Overall, go easy on the formatting. It usually doesn’t add anything to the content and often ends up being confusing or, worse, laughable. Trust that your readers will see your point through your choice of words. Over time, as you write more and read other people’s content more, your ability to put the best words in the best order will improve.