Are there legitimate uses for using bold for emphasis within a sentence?
Is there any legitimate use for using bold to emphasize something in written speech within a sentence? I understand that bold can be used for formatting and highlighting, but I am looking to understand whether bold is meaningful within a sentence.
For example, marking a date as bold is something I consider as highlighting.
My understanding so far is that bold is used in lack of proper text structure that would otherwise provide the desired emphasis.
My question is purely about boldface and not about italics.
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1 answer
Bold is one way to emphasize something in a sentence. Recasting the sentence to put the emphasis where you want it is another method. Is one preferable to another? I'm not sure. The point of any writing is to communicate your point clearly and if using bold does that, why not?
Conventional practice, however, seems to shy away from it in published work. You very rarely see bold used for emphasis in books or magazines. For technical material, you often see bold used to call out text from a different source, such as words appearing on a computer display. Obviously if you are using bold for this purpose, it would be confusing to also use it for emphasis.
One the other hand, in quick communication, where the writer may not have the time or the skill to recast, then the use of bold to clarify meaning is common and I see no reason to object to it if gets the job done. It is also commonly used on signs, where the emphasis is on reducing the amount of text to a minimum, and recasting for emphasis might increase word count.
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