Emphasising text: Using capitals, bold, Italic, or underline

You want headings and ‘navigational aids’ like subheads to stand out on the page. It is also standard to emphasise certain words within body-text, e.g. foreign words and technical terms, such as biological species names (e.g. Ascaris lumbricoides), and also titles of books. When writing by hand, use of capitals or underlining are easy ways to emphasise particular words. However, Word Processors allow better alternatives.

• CAPITALS should generally be avoided, since they do not stand out very well, and are actually difficult to read, especially if used for more than a few words.
• Bold text is the strongest way to make words stand out. In essays it should only be used for headings and subheadings (unlike here where it is designed to help you pick out key points quickly! But this is a handbook, not an essay...)
• Italic text is used in professional printing for emphasis within body text. It should not be used in essays just to emphasise things you think are really important - like that!
• Just using larger letters does not work well, and neither does s p a c i n g  o u t.
• Underlined text. If you have produced an elegant ‘looks-like-it’s-really-printed’ page style, underlining looks out of place (you rarely see it in books or magazines.). It can also be counterproductive, especially if used with capitals and/or bold. Underlined text can be quite hard to read*.

*But NB there may be good reasons for sticking with underlining, and some markers may prefer it! (If you are writing text to go to a professional printshop, they may prefer words intended for final printing in Italics to be shown underlined in the manuscript, as these are easier for the typesetter to spot. However, with the growth of computerised printing technology, this is now less important.)

Headings or titles

Heading alignments

Just as it is not always wise to justify text, so it is not always a good idea to ‘centre’ headings, especially long ones. Multiple lines which don’t all start at the same point on the left are particularly hard to read. See the second example below.

Using capitals in headings

It is not good to use all capitals for titles, especially long ones, and particularly for titles consisting of essay questions! Use ordinary ‘lower case’ text like this. And don’t capitalise every word, just the first letter of the sentence and proper nouns.

Some examples

Imagine the examples below are the tops of A4 pages.

For a short title, you might use a slightly larger point-size (but not too big! Essays aren’t posters). In the example below, centring works well. Note also judicious use of a little white space to avoid a cramped look.

For long titles, keep it simple. Which of these two would you rather have to look at, at the top of an essay? (Read through the heading of each.)

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Subheadings

Subheads can be very useful for making an essay easier to navigate round by clarifying its structure and, like paragraph spaces, can break up ‘walls’ of text. Compare the examples on this page.

Tip Don’t use more than one level of subheadings, without a very good reason. Sub-subheads, and sub-sub-subheads can confuse rather than clarify...

Warning! Teachers may have their own opinions on how appropriate it is to use subheads.

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