- Law 17, avoid all caps and underlined text.
On a typewriter, there are really two ways
to emphasize text and help call attention to it.
All caps and underlines.
That's fine if you're using a typewriter
but if you're not, and you're probably not,
it's time to abandon those bad habits
and learn better ways, more modern ways
to emphasize text.
In body text, text set in all caps is very clunky
and very heavy on the page.
All caps letters look huge and
they overwhelm the text that surrounds them.
If you're going to use all caps,
limit their use to titles and sub-heads
in text-heavy documents.
This will ensure that they're used sparingly.
For other documents like posters or invitations
and business cards, it can be easier
to incorporate text in all caps
without it being so visually disruptive.
Underlines are a typewriter convention
that told typesetters to set the
underlined text in italics.
Professionally typeset documents do not use underlines.
If you want to add horizontal lines to headings
or in pages headers or footers, use rules.
You have much more control over rules
and you can style them to visually fit in your document.
The built-in underline formatting style
should never be used, period.
On a computer, with desktop publishing software,
we have many, many more options to emphasize text
and all of these options are more professional,
they're more visually pleasing,
and they're the right way to emphasize text
so let's look at some of those.
Bold.
Using bold text is a great way
to emphasize text and help it stand out.
Italics.
Italicized text is also a great emphasis technique.
Italic text is more visually subtle than bold text
and it can be a nice way to add some emphasis
in a quiet, subdued way.
Be aware that some words need to be
set italic in order to be correct.
These include things like the names of books,
the names of magazines, movies, TV shows,
works of art, albums, planes, ships and trains.
There are other words that also
need to be italicized as well.
It's great to be familiar with these rules
and apply them in your documents.
Small caps.
Small caps can be a great way to use
capital letters for emphasis, without all that extra
visual weight, that all caps contain.
Small caps are uppercase letters that are
as tall as a lowercase x in a given typeface.
Using a different typeface.
If you're using a different typeface for emphasis,
make sure it's different enough from
the rest of your text to stand out.
If you're using this technique in body text,
align x heights of both typefaces to help integrate
them and make them look cohesive on the page.
Spacing.
Adding extra space around a block of text
can be a very effective, unexpected way
to emphasize a word or a phrase.
This technique doesn't work so well in body text
but it can be very effective on business cards,
posters, invitations and documents of that type.
Size.
Changing the size of a chunk of text
and making it really big or really small
can effectively call attention to it.
This is another technique that really doesn't
always work so well in body text but it can be
very effective in other types of documents.
Color.
Adding color is a great way to emphasize text.
But make sure that the emphasis color you choose
is different enough from your text color to stand out.
Make sure it's also still providing enough contrast
with your background to make it legible.
Be aware, that color vision deficiency will affect
people's ability to see colors in your documents.
It's estimated that about eight percent of
men and point five percent of women
experience the most common form of this deficiency,
which is red-green color vision deficiency.
So if you use color as an emphasis technique
in a document, make sure that the emphasis
is not critical to understanding the content.
If it is, you should choose a different emphasis technique.
It's best to pick one of these techniques
and stick with it throughout the document.
Here's an example of a couple of paragraphs
where the emphasis technique switches throughout.
This makes the text look pretty jumbled,
it's visually confusing and overall, jarring.
Now, here's the same text where we chose to use
only bold as our emphasis technique.
The effect is much more professional
and overall, the page looks a lot less jumbled.
Also be careful that you're not over-signaling.
You only really need to use one
of these techniques at a time.
Here's an example of emphasized text that uses
three of the emphasis techniques we just talked about.
It's too much and it's unnecessary.
We emphasized, then emphasized again
and then we emphasized again.
Using one emphasis technique at a time
is more professional and helps the text
to stand out without over-doing it.
Let's summarize.
There will be times when you want
to emphasize some text in a document
to make it stand out and draw a reader's attention.
There are many, many ways to do this effectively
using a computer and desktop publishing software.
You want to avoid using underlines
and all caps to indicate emphasis.
This will help your documents look more professional,
more modern, and more visually pleasing.
That's law 17.
Avoid all caps and underlined text.