Emphasising text: correct methods
Advisory
The information on this page is only applicable if you're editing the University webpages using T4. It presumes that you have already completed the beginners and advanced level of the T4 training (a link for staff only - opens in new window).
Bold text
The best and simplest way to emphasise text, is to make it bold.
However, don't format entire blocks of text in bold, unless they are short. It's ok to emphasise one or two short sentences together, i.e. a short paragraph communicating something of particular importance to your audience.
For anything beyond thirty words, though, you should consider a different approach, because then:
- bold text will start to look like a stylistic choice rather than a highlight – i.e. that some parts of the site are simply in a thicker 'heavy' font.
- readability will be affected (regular weight text is slightly easier to read).
- the contrasting impact of visual emphasis will be reduced, or even lost altogether.
If you have a significant amount of text to draw attention to, you should probably be using one or more headings for this purpose, possibly in conjunction with limited use of bold text.
Working with headings
Regular sentence text that you wish to emphasise should not be formatted as a heading purely for the purpose of emphasising it. Heading formatting must only to be used for actual headings – i.e. where the purpose is to introduce a new topic or sub-topic on a page.
However, don't forget that you can give important text its own heading to differentiate it on a page. It's fine to have a heading that says, for example 'Important: please read' followed by the text that you need to draw attention to, and here its impact is in the choice of wording rather than the weight of the font. Bold text can of course still be used for a limited amount of the text under that heading as well, if necessary.
You can emphasise certain words in headings by making them bold if you need to. For example, you may have several similar headings and want to emphasise their differences to make them quicker and easier to spot:
- Information for students in Group A going to France
- Information for students in Group A going to Germany
- Information for students in Group B going to France
- Information for students in Group B going to Germany
You can also emphasise an entire heading, but only if it really warrants it, for example: 'Important: deadline change'.
