Don’t Do This

The inappropriate ways of emphasizing certain words or phrases are generally holdovers from using the typewriter, when our only options were to type words in All CAPS or underline them. Rarely should you use all caps, and never should you underline words in print. Never. That’s a law.

When words are set in all caps, we lose the recognition of the shape of the word and are forced to read the word letter by letter (how many times have you read that now?). For instance, the word “cat” in lowercase has a different shape from the word “dog,” and that shape helps us identify it. When the words CAT or DOG are set in all caps, their rectangular shapes are identical.

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