See this word!

I saw a post on LinkedIn with a list of words people often mix up: lose & loose, chalk & chock, pique, peek & peak… My people (friends, clients, peers, fellow freelancers) already have those figured out. I didn’t care about those errors, but I agreed with Meredith Goins’ sentiment:

“It's true that good copywriting should sound like a friend talking to you. Which means it doesn't have to follow every single rule of grammar…. But some grammar mistakes will simply make your writing look unintelligent.”

Right!! I’m not a stickler for rules and conventions… until it makes you look bad. My editing style could best be described as ‘um, there’s spinach in your teeth.’ If someone might look at you(r words) funny, then I have your back. If your message is at risk of being misunderstood, then I will correct it. Other than that, take all the license with grammar, punctuation and paragraph structure you want.

So in the interest of spreading clarity and acuity, here’s a thing I muck up frequently and I know my writers do too: how to emphasize certain words, thoughts and expressions.

When I want to make you pay special attention to one word or idea in a sentence, should I use ALL CAPS? Should I italicize the word in question? Put it in “quotes”?

I’m always encouraging you to write like you speak. How do you “write” that extra oomph we give words when we talk?

You mean I SHOULDN’T use ALL CAPS?!?

I was called out by my friend Anthony Majanlahti for using all caps in a blog post; he’s one of the smartest and most scholarly people I know so I listened. Now I feel my hand slapped from afar every time I stretch for the shift key. He’s right. ALL CAPS are used FAR too often. They’re kind of lazy. AND they’re AGGRESSIVE- looking. Most of us learned that ALL CAPS MEAN YOU ARE SHOUTING. So they really aren’t the best way to convey emphasis, especially for kind, human-to-human communication.

Maybe “this” calls for “quotation marks.”

Can you draw special attention to a word or phrase by “putting it in double quotes”? 

Dangerous. Here’s why.

The most common use for double quotes is when you’re actually quoting someone.

“I reserve double quotes for things a real person has thought or said,'' I recently explained to a friend. If you put double quotation marks around a phrase “that just sounds weird,” you might confuse your reader into thinking you overheard someone say “that just sounds weird.” And then they wonder who said it and it gets confusing. Confusing is bad.

People are also used to seeing double quotes to indicate the titles of chapters and short works (ex. “The One Where Joey Moves Out") or books if you’re following AP Style (ex. “Eat, Pray, Love”). So again, if you want to emphasize that you can change someone’s life with “8 Simple Habits,” they may think there’s an article out there that they should be reading. Also confusing. Confusing is bad.

Then there’s the common use of double quotation marks around a word that isn’t a quote or a title, which implies that you’re using the word sarcastically. Those are called scare or sneer quotes (awesome terms for this).

When you write that your 20-year-old “cleaned” the kitchen… well, we can all picture what that kitchen looked like when he left. 

Misplaced double quotes on packaging drives me crazy. Again, so confusing to signal that your “natural” product is everything but natural.

Okay, here’s a ‘reliable-ish’ way to show emphasis.

To keep myself out of trouble, I reserve double quotes for actual quotes that can be attributed to someone saying or thinking something, and I go to single quotes to show I’m using a word in an ‘unusual’ way. 

Back in this post, I was writing about words that had different connotations. Here’s one of my paragraphs:

“I pay close attention to the words I choose. Avoid jargon. Use inclusive language. Stay on brand. Those are some good, basic word rules. Then there are choices we make that give our writing a more immutable component, which I can best describe as ‘energy’. ”

I put ‘energy’ in single quotes, because words aren’t literally made up of energy the same way matter is, but they have ‘energy’ in the way that they make us feel things. So when I make up a word, like ‘reliable’ish’ or take poetic license with a word’s meaning, I’ll put ‘em in single quotes.

Single quotes ‘surround’ a word, helping it stand out, which is marginally different than emphasizing a word.

Which brings me to the clearest, cleanest way to show emphasis: using italics.  

Italics are the original emphasis. That’s what they’ve always been used for. Well, not always. Apparently Aldus Manutius added the slanty-style to his Venetian press in 1500 to replicate handwriting. But 200 or so years later, italics became an accepted way to… 

“...emphasize key points in a printed text, to identify many types of creative works, to cite foreign words or phrases, or, when quoting a speaker, a way to show which words they stressed. One manual of English usage described italics as "the print equivalent of underlining"; in other words, underscore in a manuscript directs a typesetter to use italic.” (Wikipedia)

Right. Underscoring. Today, underlining almost always means there’s an embedded link in the text. Ever spent an annoying amount of time trying to open a link, just to realize the writer was making a point? Underline emphasis has gone the way of <ahem> two spaces after a period.

Oh my god, what was <that>?

The keyboard gives us all kinds of other ways to highlight words, ideas and terms. When I can't use italics, like in Facebook and LinkedIn posts, I’lI go to asterisks to *offset* a word. When I’m inserting a ‘sound’ rather than a statement, I like the look of those <sigh> chevron brackets. I even know a copywriter who gave up on brackets altogether and switched to {these things} but I’m not a fan.

My use of ‘punctuation-adjacent’ symbols is not convention, and I’ll probably hear from Anthony Majanlahti again. Until then, my hill-to-die-on is clarity, and as long as your punctuation makes things clearer and NOT more unclear, then I won’t come at your work with my red pen. 

Do what you have to, brave writers, to make sure your reader gets your message. 

What are your pet writing peeves? Are you seeing anything online that’s driving your inner editor up the wall? Do share!