Formatting tips for online communications
I will link to this in the "Tips" section and add to it from time to time.
- Check spelling.
- Break up long paragraphs into shorter ones.
- Make headlines easy to scan. As with newspaper headlines, shorten your title, if possible, to get it to fit on one line. If it must wrap, be sure you don't leave one solitary orphan word on the second line.
- Use underlines only for links. Otherwise readers will click on your underlined text and wonder why the link is broken.
If you want a book title to appear underlined, you can make the title a link to a review of the book or a place where readers can obtain it.
2 Comments:
FYI, underlining text was a convention adopted because mechanical typewriters couldn't do italics. Underline means italics. So when you write the title of a book or moview, put it between <em></em> tags to italicize it. It's preferred typographical style.
You are right that for print media, italics should be used in place of underlining. For online users, however, italics make text harder to read: "the readability of italicized text, particularly at screen resolutions, is much lower than in comparably sized roman text." Seigel also points out that italics are "harder to read," and that they are associated with rendering bugs in some browsers.
I did use italics for the titles in our class reading list to conform to standard academic bibliography format.
Otherwise, when I write for online audiences, I generally use italics as little as possible.
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