It’s Not ‘Ironic’, It’s Important: Five Ways to Use Typographic Emphasis in Academic Writing
Typographic emphasis is a useful tool in academic writing because it offsets a word for special consideration from the rest of the text visually, conveying to the reader how a word should be read without explicitly stating it—something easily done in speech or via body language but that needs special treatment in text, usually done through quotation marks, italics, boldface and capitalization. The tricky part is choosing the correct typographic style so as to convey your thoughts accurately, something careful proofreading takes into account.
What follows is a summary of the different typographic choices academics have at their disposal when writing their manuscripts, with general guidelines about how to employ them effectively.
Italics
Italics are the gold standard for academic writing. This is the best way to create emphasis, but it is specific. Its function is to tell a reader that a word is key to understanding the argument being put forth. This is different than highlighting how something is termed (see section on quotation marks below), though they are often confused by writers.
Here’s an example from the Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS; 2010):
The two chief tactics of this group, obstructionism and misinformation, require careful analysis.
It is assumed that the terms ‘obstructionism’ and ‘misinformation’ are critical for understanding the ensuing text and therefore require this styling so the reader can easily reference them again. However, once you’ve emphasised a word you should not keep emphasising the word after its first occurrence—it’s unnecessary to keep reminding a reader that something is important, and, in fact, you might cause it to lose its importance by emphasising it too much.
A second use of italics for emphasis is literally a reflection of how you would stress a word when you would talk, changing its tone:
The agreement was not just any though, the January Accord was the agreement that would change relations between the two countries indefinitely.
By making ‘the’ more prominent, the reader knows the January Accord is the most important without having to state so, and it’s a reflection of how we would speak. This is perhaps more a function of drama and thus has more of a place in other forms of writing; however, it can be used to great effect at the right moment in academic writing.
A third use mentioned in the American Psychological Association (APA) Manual (2010) is for words that could be misread, giving the example:
the small group [meaning a designation, not group size]
Italics are also used in other ways, such as highlighting a foreign word or showing that something is a particular kind of title, but I will leave that for another post because it not solely about emphasis.
Quotation Marks
Another frequently used form of visual emphasis are quotation marks—in English these are made using upright, curly* opening (‘/“) and closing (’/”) marks (i.e. ‘…’)—but they are also the most poorly used by academic writers and are often confused with italics when highlighting a key term. (*Note: You should never use straight quote marks. They are a left-over from the typewriter days and serve no function.)
According to most style guides, quotation marks should be reserved for what are most often called ‘scare quotes’, marks which ‘alert readers that a term is used in a nonstandard (or slang), ironic, or other special sense’ (CMOS 2010). When used properly these can be very effective, placing questions upon terms that should be interrogated or made suspect, for example:
Politicians use ‘participative’ planning to green light development projects, pointing to their ‘consultations’ as proof of public agreement.
The scare quotes here put into question the veracity of the participative part of the planning process as well as the legitimacy of the consultations to great effect. Put differently, scare quotes convey the same meaning as ‘so-called’, which incidentally should almost never be followed by a word in scare quotes because it is redundant (i.e., don’t write ‘…so-called ‘consultations’…’), the irony is already implied. Scare quotes also don’t need to be used more than once. After alerting a reader to the irony, it’s not necessary to do so again and again.
However, the reverse is also true. When used poorly, scare quotes can imply undesired irony. Consider our earlier example from the CMOS (2010) with the emphasis changed:
The two chief tactics of this group, ‘obstructionism’ and ‘misinformation’, require careful analysis.
With quotation marks instead of italics, the meaning gets confused. Is there something wrong with these tactics? Is this why they require careful analysis? This kind of misrepresentation was famously displayed in the “blog” of “unnecessary” quotation marks. Enjoy.
Quotation marks are, importantly, also used to emphasise when writing about a word instead of its meaning. For example:
The term ‘bemused’ was in this case being used poorly, being thought of by the writers as synonymous with ‘mildly amused’ rather than ‘confused’ or ‘bewildered’, its actual meaning.
The words within quotation marks here are not conveying their meanings at all, but are instead the subject of discussion and the emphasis makes this distinction clear to the reader. CMOS states that italics can also be used here (APA recommends only italics)—so it is a choice. The consideration is due to the fact that this kind of emphasis can be confused with other uses of quotation marks. Still, in my experience quotation marks are usually preferred for this kind of emphasis.
As with italics, be careful not to overuse quotation marks; they are, obviously, also used for quotations but also various kinds of titles. If overused, a text can begin to get rather confusing to read because of how marked up it is.
For a list of everything to do with quotation marks, check out Grammar Girl’s great summary here.
Capitalization
There is a strong tendency in writing to overuse capitalization and thus cause distraction and confusion for the reader. However, it is perhaps the most basic form of typographic emphasis and is deserving of its own post. In essence, it tells the reader that something is a proper noun—an official/specific name for someone or something—that something is an acronym or abbreviation, or that a sentence is beginning. Beyond these, however, capitalization should almost never be used, with some specific exceptions.
If you’re used to fiction writing, you’ll likely have come across ALL CAPS. This has the effect of overemphasis, and it usually indicates shouting or irony in dialogue. But, like all tools, it can be used to great effect. For example, using all caps in participative interviews captured within sociological texts might better capture the way a participant actually reported to you, adding the emphasis needed when someone shouts or uses a word ironically. CMOS also suggests that all caps can be used for instances where names are used as codes or in a different way from usual and where there may be cause for confusion. For example:
VENUS [used] as a cover name for a person or for a computer server rather than the planet. (Chicago Manual of Style 2010)
SMALL CAPS (which I’m unfortunately unable to recreate in this blog) is considered a more elegant way of presenting ALL CAPS and is rather useful in disciplines such as linguistics*, which use small caps to offset “an important term at its first use or definition” (2014)—not unlike italics elsewhere (*guides to linguistic style, can be found here and here):
On this basis, the two main alignment types, namely NOMINATIVE-ACCUSATIVE and ERGATIVEABSOLUTIVE, are distinguished.
This example, and its contradictory nature to other style guides, suggests that academics should be careful to check style guidelines within their disciplines as different fields often employ different rules.
Boldface and Underlining
Both boldface and underlining are generally frowned upon in academic writing when used purely for emphasis. Their function has mainly more to do with offsetting the style of (sub)headings and captions.
Nonetheless, there is no doubt that boldface creates emphasis by adding contrast to a word, and it can be used for such purposes, albeit sparingly. More often than not, if you want to use boldface to highlight a word, italics (and sometimes quotation marks) are the correct choice. CMOS suggests that boldface ‘is more often an aesthetic than a purely logical decision’ and should be used only ‘when a greater prominence than capitalization is called for’.
Underlining is more or less the same thing except it is the technique used by typewriters to indicate the need for italics—so its function is the same but no longer in use. However, under the rarest of circumstances, it is still a tool in your emphasis arsenal, and its use should be context-dependent.
For example, in my last post on parallelism in academic writing, I used underlining mixed with italics so as to demonstrate more clearly the pattern I was trying to indicate.
Members of the council were obliged to communicate, to share, and to distribute the results of their deliberations.
Comprehension is Key
As I mentioned in the introductory paragraphs, these are general guidelines and are mostly related to the social science and humanities fields. I recommend familiarizing yourself with the style of your field which can have field-specific rules. However, like any technique in writing, the most important thing is reader comprehension. Emphasis is there to help a reader understand your argument. If you are distracting or confusing the reader, you are doing them a disservice, but, if it helps elucidate the message you are trying to convey, you can’t really go wrong.
References
Chicago Manual of Style: 16th Edition. August 2010: University of Chicago Press.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emphasis_(typography)
https://iep.utm.edu/adorno/
https://www.fonts.com/content/learning/fyti/typographic-tips/emphasis
https://grammar.yourdictionary.com/punctuation/rules-for-underlining.html
https://grammarist.com/style/boldface/
https://www.dailywritingtips.com/the-functions-of-boldface/
https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/pdf/GenericStyleRules.pdf