Ways to Achieve Emphasis in a Paragraph
- Define emphasis as element of writing
- Ways to achieve paragraph emphasis
- Foreign terms
- Quotation Marks
- Coined words etc .
- Common words
- Foreign words
Define emphasis as element of writing. Italics and quotation marks are used in the text to highlight words, note and translate words in a language foreign to a reader, indicate irony (scare quotes), or mark words and letters that are referred to as words, not to the meaning they convey.
Three ways to achieve emphasis in a paragraph: italics, underline, quotation marks
- Keywords. Emphasize a keyword or phrase in your text by placing it in italics.
- Titles. The titles of books and the names of periodicals in your text and references.
- Foreign terms. Non-English words or terms used in your text are set in italics.
- Good writers use italics for emphasis only as an occasional adjunct to efficient sentence structure. Overused, italics quickly lose their force
- Add italics to a word or phrase only the first time it is used, thereafter use plain text.
Example of emphasis by italics
- Coined words, slang, nicknames, and words or phrases used ironically or facetiously may be enclosed in quotation marks at first mention. Thereafter omit quotation marks.
- Common words used in a special sense. “Enclose in quotation marks a common word used in a special technical sense when the context does not make the meaning clear.”
- Foreign words. Use quotation marks for the literal translation or definition of non-English words.
- Titles. use quotation marks to enclose titles of short poems, essays, lectures, radio and television programs, songs, the name of an electronic file, parts of published works
“Example of emphasis by quotation marks”
Underlining is a preferred emphasis in writing in MLA format style, used in the same ways as italics
Example of emphasis by uderline