Stop With the Random Bold and Italics Bullshit
Sir Italics is rolling over in his grave…
I beg of you — enough with the articles that have the majority of the words in bold or italics. My eyes hurt, and my writer’s soul hurts. You’re killing me and the other editors who have to edit it. And your readers are in an italics-induced coma.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard my editor friends have another bitching session about formatting and the topics of bolding and italicizing comes up. Each time I can virtually feel them pulling their hair out.
We’re fed up.
Your writing looks like it's yelling at me. It looks like a squeeze page (landing page) trying to sell me a course on ‘How to sell knock-off Spanx on TikTok’. It looks like you’re using a big laser pointer to point at words because the reader is too dumb to pick out what’s important.
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about — but don’t read it! It’s AI-generated garbled shite. But I didn’t want to call anyone out in particular by screenshotting their articles (but I could swing a dead cat and find one). Here is what I mean by bold and italics bullshite:
Do you like reading things like that? I don’t. I’ve never had anyone tell me they absolutely adore it. Nobody likes that shizzle and it’s hard on the eyeballizzles.
It’s the writer’s equivalent of a MySpace page.
The words and formatting look like a drunk schizophrenic on a four-day meth bender wrote it. Or they went out for another hit and let their cat roll around on the keyboard.
‘But it makes me look super cool and unique!’
No, it doesn’t.
‘But it helps people scan quicker!’
Why do you want people scanning your work? Sorry (not sorry), but if people are skimming it, then you need to work harder on your words. If your words aren’t enough to keep them reading — pick. better. words. Using bold and italic fonts is the easy way out.
Your goal shouldn’t be for people to skim your work at the speed of an AI crawler bot. All you’re doing is pulling their attention from other words and disrupting their reading flow. Also, on a platform that pays by read time, this makes less than no sense.
I’m a dirty, dirty skimmer myself. But — I really want to read your content. It’s your job to grab my potato-brained attention, get me to slow down, and enjoy the digital ride. When I see random bold and italics in articles you know what I do? I bounce the hell onto something that doesn’t abuse my eyes (and intelligence) that way. I can guarantee you I’m not the only one who does that.
Let’s try this another way. When was the last time you followed someone whose work you just quickly skimmed through?
What To Do Instead
You don’t need to MySpace-ify your writing to emphasize readers’ focus on certain elements of the piece. There are better ways to do it.
1. Vary your Paragraph Length
This will offer your readers a visual flow, and a single-sentence paragraph offers you a point of emphasis. That single-sentence summabitch will be like a little mic drop.
2. Use it Sparingly
There’s a time and place for everything. Every-danged-thing. When it’s used sparingly it can be effective. Overdone and you look like a crazy person, or a cheezy n’ sleazy internet marketer. Also, stop using all caps — nobody wants you yelling at them.
3. Pull Quote
You can do a pull quote to emphasize your point. To do it you just highlight the phrase or a word and click the quotations formatting button twice.
4. Have Faith in your Reader
I can’t stress the importance of this option enough. Have a little faith that your reader will find the most important bits. You don’t know what will resonate with them the most. Bolding and italicizing points rob them of that opportunity, and they may not agree about that being the most important.
Have faith in your reader — and respect for your reader.
