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Emphasis is a budget

Bold, italic, quotation marks and the underline are the whole toolkit for showing that a word is doing something unusual. Four marks, and most websites spend them as if they were free.

October 2026

A marked word works because it is rare. That is the whole mechanism, and it is easy to spend.

Someone scanning a page sees what is different before reading what is there. That is the entire mechanism: a marked word works because it is rare. Put bold in every second sentence and the eye stops reading it as a signal and starts reading it as texture — and the one word that genuinely mattered has gone under with the rest.

Which makes emphasis a budget rather than a toolbox. A page has a fixed amount of attention in it, every mark spends some, and there is no way to earn more. Matthew Butterick puts the arithmetic in one line: if everything is emphasised, nothing is. Everything below follows from that.

It also explains why the question is almost never “how do I make this stand out”. It is “what is this mark telling the reader”, and then: does the sentence still work if I take it away?

Bold or italic, not both

Butterick’s rule is blunt and worth adopting whole: treat bold and italic as mutually exclusive, and use as little of either as you can. Bold italic is not twice the emphasis; it is a writer who could not decide, and it reads that way.

The two are not interchangeable either. Italic is a change of voice — quieter, sideways, the typographic equivalent of a slight lean forward. Bold is volume. A word set in bold is a word you would say louder in the room, and most sentences have no such word in them.

One complication for the web: Butterick notes that sans-serif italics are often too close to the roman to register, which is why print typographers reach for bold when the text is sans. Most websites are set in a sans face. So the italic has to be chosen and spaced with some care, or it does nothing at all.

What each mark actually says

Italic names things. The title of a book, a publication, a product, a website. It also marks a word being mentioned rather than used — the word free in a headline is doing different work from a free sample. And, sparingly, it carries gentle stress.

Bold is for the term a passage is about, announced at the front so a scanner can find it, and for the label on a button in a set of instructions. Both of the large documentation style guides — Google’s and Microsoft’s — say the same thing about interface names: put them in bold, and do not put them in quotation marks or italics. Microsoft adds the other half, which is more often forgotten: that rule is for documentation. In interface copy and marketing, bold and italic should be avoided altogether, and the sentence should be rewritten so the element names itself.

Quotation marks are for words the reader will literally meet on the screen — a link that says “Read more”, a button behind “Manage preferences” — and for a term being introduced before it is explained. They are the mark that survives being read aloud, which the other three do not.

The underline means one thing on the web, and it is not emphasis. More on that below, because it is the mark people get wrong most expensively.

Choose by what the mark means, in other words, not by how loud you want to be. If two marks would both work, the passage probably needs neither.

The argument about italics

Here the advice splits, and it is worth knowing why. Butterick, writing for readers of printed documents, treats italic as the more civilised emphasis. The British Dyslexia Association’s style guide says the opposite in plain words: avoid italics and underlining, because they make text appear to run together and cause crowding — use bold instead.

They are not contradicting each other so much as optimising for different readers. A slanted, tightly fitted letterform is elegant to one reader and a wall to another. Both are describing the same physical fact: italic is denser than roman, and density is where reading gets hard.

The settlement I use is to keep italic for naming rather than for stress, never to set a long passage in it, and to give it a hair of extra letter-spacing so it breathes at the same rate as the text around it. That last point is a typographic detail nobody asks for and everybody feels.

The underline belongs to links

The underline is not really a typographic form at all. It is a typewriter workaround: no bold, no italic on the machine, so you wound the carriage back and struck underscores beneath the words. Every typographer since has wanted it gone, and on paper they are right.

On the web it acquired a job. Butterick argues that even there the convention is dying, and points at the newspapers and the large platforms that have dropped it. The accessibility side of the literature says something much harder to argue with. Under the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, a link identified by colour alone is a documented failure — F73 — unless the link text differs from the surrounding text by at least 3:1 in lightness, not merely in hue. A cue that appears only on hover does not count, because a great many readers never hover at all.

Nielsen Norman Group’s guidance lands in the same place with a practical division: underline links in running text, where a coloured word among other words is genuinely ambiguous; in navigation and link lists, where position and shape already announce the function, the underline can go. And never colour non-link text in the link colour.

Which leaves the rule that costs nothing and is broken constantly: never underline something that is not a link. Thirty years have trained every reader on the web to try clicking it. An underline used for emphasis is not a style choice, it is a broken promise.

None of it reaches everybody

There is one more fact that quietly settles most arguments about emphasis: screen readers do not announce it. Both of the elements HTML provides for the purpose, strong and em, pass through the common screen readers without a sound unless the reader has turned on a style-reporting setting that is nowhere near the default.

So the bold word is simply not there for part of your audience. That does not make the mark useless — it is still doing its work for everyone scanning with their eyes — but it fixes its status: formatting may reinforce meaning, never carry it. The test is mechanical. Delete every mark from the paragraph and read it again. If it has lost something, the sentence was leaning on the typography, and the sentence is what needs fixing.

Use the semantic elements anyway, and choose between them by meaning rather than by appearance: strong and em where the word matters, the plain b and i where you only want the shape — a product name, a term. It costs nothing today and it is the sort of thing that starts being read tomorrow.

How we use it here

Everything above is other people’s evidence. Here is what it adds up to on this website, which is the only form in which advice of this kind is any use.

The house rules

  • Bold appears at the start of a block, naming the thing the block is about, so the page can be read by its first words. Never inside a running sentence.
  • Italic names: titles, publications, products, websites — and a word being discussed as a word rather than used. It also sets the closing note under each essay, where it marks a change of voice rather than emphasis. It is never used to shout.
  • Quotation marks hold words that appear on a screen: “Read more”, “Manage preferences”, “Application form”.
  • The underline means a link, in running text, always. Nothing else on this site is ever underlined.
  • Never bold and italic together, never capitals for emphasis, never colour as the only signal.
  • And the rule that outranks the rest: if a sentence needs a mark to be understood, the mark is not the problem.

It is a short list, and following it is mostly a matter of resisting the moment where a paragraph feels flat and the bold button is right there. That flatness is information. It usually means the sentence is too long, or the important word is in the wrong place, and no amount of formatting will fix either.

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