A Matter of Emphasis

In the category of tilting at windmills, I’d like to register my complaint against gratuitous italics and bold face type. I know they are supposed to be essential to good blogging, but I find them confusing, annoying, and distracting. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not at all against bold type for highlighting lists or a well-placed italics for emphasis. If I say “Jesus didn’t just speak for God, he even claimed to be God” the italics give my point some added mmph. But the new trend is to put extraneous emphasis all over the place. So my second and third sentences might look like this:

I know they are supposed to be essential to good blogging, but I find them confusing, annoying, and distracting. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not at all against bold type for highlighting lists or a well-placed italics for emphasis.

This may be a slight exaggeration, but only slight. When I read blogs like this I can’t see the forest because the author is forcing me to look only at certain trees. My eyes start jumping all around, unable to concentrate on anything in regular Times New Roman. If we only want people to read the bold and italics, we should just use bullet points.

What’s annoying in blogging, is even worse in books. Take, for example, these few sentences from a recent book:

And it is fair to ask how one can stand against arrogance and intolerance and persecution except on the basis of knowledge. Is that not what he is doing–resting his case on what he knows? What else is possible? He certainly did not think he was just expressing his own personal belief or commitment. And is it not true that the brightest examples of people who stand against arrogance and intolerance are, for the most part, those who stand on the basis of what they take to be religious and moral knowledge? Wasn’t that true of most of those who did opposed Hitler and his ash pond? And, just for the record, those who did not oppose Hitler usually blamed it, precisely, on lack of knowledge: “We did not know this was being done!”

This is too much emphasis to keep straight. What’s really important here? Everything? On another page in the same book I counted seventy-one italicized words in six different sentences scattered across two paragraphs. Seventy-one! I don’t know if it’s the author or the editor, but someone needs to take up decaf.

Here’s one more not atypical example from a different book:

Further, Piper’s discussion of Romans 3:1-8 never even attempts to come to terms with what the paragraph is about, because Piper has held at arm’s length–or perhaps has never even glimpsed, despite the various things he has read which make it clear enough–that the point of the covenant always was that God would bless the whole world through Abraham’s family. The point of Romans 3:1-8 is not a general discussion about God’s attributes and human failure. Likewise, the unfaithfulness of the Israelites is not their lack of belief. The point is that God has promised to bless the world through Israel, and Israel has been faithless to that commission.

Do we really need to emphasize a preposition ending a phrase? Are these sentences easier to follow with the italics? Wouldn’t the punctuation have made the middle sentence stand out anyway? In my twentieth century brain, the italics render the paragraph above less clear, not more.

Call me an old-fashioned crank, but I hope writers and publishers will not give in to the pressure to make all their prose a bouncing ball of bold print and italics. Emphases are like exclamations: save them for when you really need them. And for the 99% of our sentences that don’t, let’s rely on good writing and clear thinking to keep the reader’s attention and make our main points obvious.

That seems like a good plan to me!