Summary

Fowler argues that excessive use of bold formatting in technical and business writing is self-defeating, a trend he sees amplified by LLMs. He explains that bold's power comes from drawing the skimming eye, but this only works when used sparingly. He prefers italics for in-text emphasis and reserves bold for headings and highlighting unfamiliar terms at the point of explanation. He also notes that callouts are usually superior to bolded sentences for drawing attention, and closes with a deliberately over-bolded paragraph to illustrate the problem.

Key Insight

Bold formatting's power to draw the skimming eye is destroyed by overuse, and LLMs are accelerating this problem by defaulting to heavy bold in generated text.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 4

  The more a writer uses typographical emphasis, the less power it has, quickly reaching the point where it loses all its benefits.

• 6

  Using a lot of capitals is rightly reviled as shouting, and when we see it used widely, it raises our doubts on the quality of the underlying thinking.

• 3

  The greatest value of bold is that draws the eye to the bold text even if the reader isn't reading, but glancing over the page.

• 5

  Its effectiveness is inversely proportional to how often it's used.

• 3

  It's important to write in such a way to make it an enjoyable experience for the reader - even, indeed especially, when I'm also trying to explain things for them.

• 5

  Bullet-lists are over used too - I always try to write such things as a prose paragraph instead, as prose flows much better than bullets and is thus more pleasant to read.

Tone

reflective