How to emphasise

From time to time you will want to emphasise text in a document you are writing. The most common use is drawing attention to a particular part of a quote, but there are many other situations where emphasis is useful.

There is one good way of doing this. It is to put text in italics. Like this.

If, for whatever reason, you don’t like italics, there are two acceptable alternatives. You can use bold or underline.

The reason that the last two are less desirable than italics is that they make your document slightly harder to read and slightly less attractive. These differences are minor. Only a typography nerd will notice or care. For practical purposes, there is little difference between italics, bold and underline. Having said that, since italics are that little bit better, why not use them?

Whatever you do, it is best to pick one method. A document with italics, bold and underline on the same page will look odd and be hard to read.

Even if you stick to one method, it is best used sparingly. If you emphasise everything, nothing will be emphasised. And, again, a page which is half bold type will look strange.

Do not use different colours or changes in size. They look awful.

All of this advice is aimed at emphasising text inside paragraphs. The rules for formatting things like headings or titles are rather more relaxed, although restraint is a good policy there as well.

There are two reasons to get this sort of thing right. The first is that it will make your document look better. It is the written version of shaving and putting on a clean shirt before going to the tribunal.

The second is that lawyers tend to associate badly formatted documents with bad cases. That is not an association you want the tribunal to make. This is one of those prejudices that is partly, but not entirely, justified. The fact that someone writes only in capitals does not mean that their case is weak. But it is rarely a good sign when someone turns in the written equivalent of an impassioned rant, full of strange fonts, half in bold and with large sections of green ink.

Do not, however, allow yourself to become neurotic about formatting your document. Cases are not won or lost on the beauty of the parties’ typesetting (if they were the standards of legal typography would be much higher). The only thing you really need to avoid is turning your document into a mess. If you are aware enough to worry about this issue, you have nothing to worry about.