Different ways to emphasize

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The best writing is one that uses typographic markup sparingly. There are some agents and publishers who prefer manuscripts to be submitted in plain text! If your writing relies on italics, boldface, and a certain page layout, it won't work for those publishers.

The reason for publishers to demand plain text submissions is that the absence of markup is usually a sign of quality. A skillful writer can emphasize through their writing alone and doesn't need markup to do so. Consider the following examples:

I came home yesterday.

Yesterday, I came home. (emphasis on "yesterday")

I came home. Yesterday. Not on Sunday, as my wife expected. (even stronger emphasis on "yesterday")

Or these:

He walked down the road.

He ambled down the road. (emphasis through a less common word)

Slowly, placing his feet carefully, he quietly crept along the sidewalk towards the glowing red light. (emphasis through detail)

There are many other ways to put focus or emphasis on certain parts of your story. What I'd suggest is that you play with your passage, rephrase and reorder the words, sentences, even paragraphs, until your readers are led through your story in the way that you want.

If you have done that, and still feel that you need to emphasize a certain word, use italics. All other markup is unconventional and, in literary fiction, bad style. To me, boldface, all caps, underlined text, or changing font faces in fiction are a sure sign of a bad writer.

posted over 5 years ago

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