How Do I Show Emphasis in a Sentence

If you need to emphasize a word or a particular fact in a sentence, you can use italics to stress it. That said, italics and other font changes lose their impact if overused. It is best to use such devices sparingly and rely on strong writing and strategic word placement to get your point across.

Before the advent of word processing, it was common to underline words to show emphasis. You can still use underlining in your writing and be correct.

Why did you give Sara the sandwich with mustard on it? That was Casey’s sandwich.

Italics, however, are the more current—and more elegant—way to emphasize a word or phrase.

There are fewer than five thousand Black Rhinos left on the African continent today.

At last, he saw the face under the cloak’s hood. It was her.

Italics can be useful to emphasize a few words at a time and can be especially helpful if a single word is stressed, as in the examples above. But when overused, too many font changes can confuse and overwhelm the reader; in the world of the written word, it is “shock and awe.”

Emphasis Through Strategic Word or Clause Placement

When your aim is to point the reader toward key facts and phrases, using introductory adverbs and adverb phrases can be very effective. Some examples of these are especially, particularly, most importantly, and above all. Other adverbs work well in the introductory position too. In the example below, you will see what a difference word position can make in a sentence: the first iteration sounds almost casual in tone compared to the second.

He emerged from the vanguard unscathed, remarkably.

Remarkably, he emerged from the vanguard unscathed.

Repetition of a phrase can also have a compelling effect in your writing, rhythmically underscoring the essence of your key message.

How could he ask which of them I truly loved? It was him. It had always been him.

Another method of emphasis in a series of sentences is the placement of a short, emphatic sentence to “punctuate” a crucial point and even add an element of drama.

Jim decided to find out if playing frisbee in a glass factory was a bad idea. It was.

Use With Caution: Boldface, Capitals, and Exclamation Marks

Boldface fonts can be used sparsely to draw attention to words or short phrases, and are most often seen in business writing. Using boldface for emphasis is not appropriate for academic writing.

Smoking is not permitted in the workplace.

A draft must be submitted three days before the publication deadline.

“All caps” writing is rarely warranted, and if you use capitals too often, your paragraphs will appear silly and chaotic. In electronic communications, it can even be perceived as shouting.

A draft must be submitted THREE DAYS BEFORE THE PUBLICATION DEADLINE.

Some people may actually be offended by the style of the above example. Therefore, use all capitals very sparingly (and never in academic writing).

“BE CAREFUL!” I cried.

Similarly, exclamation marks certainly have a place in English writing, but they are too often abused. They can be used effectively in fiction and informal writing, but you should avoid them in business and academic writing. Using an exclamation point implies an outcry or extreme excitement, and should be reserved for unique circumstances.

The exit is to your right!

Off with his head!

A final note about exclamation points: when you do use them, remember that you need only one of them. Not two, not five, not seven. One.

Here’s Your Ultimate Sunday Night De-Stress Playlist

There’s a gentle balancing act in calibrating a mellow playlist, say for the Sunday evening before a hectic workweek.

Cue up too many happy songs and the result can feel saccharine. Too many sad ones will just leave you depressed. Jams that get you moving are fun when you’re going out, but tonight you’re staying in. Then again, you need something with a pulse: you’re not winding down for bed quite yet.

As the sun sets on your weekend and you curl up, perhaps to read or do a little writing, we’ve got you covered. Here’s our take on a relaxing Sunday night playlist.

Start with an old-timey vibe

What says “It’s okay, you’re right where you’re supposed to be” more plainly than the sun-dappled voice of Van Morrison?

Classics like “Sweet Thing” kindly refrain from jerking your attention or ensorcelling your dancing shoes, but the track’s layered strings reward attentive listening, if that’s your thing.

What follows is a meandering instrumental cut by Willie West. Instrumentals will be a recurring theme on this playlist. That’s because it’s often easier to read or write when the part of your brain that handles words isn’t also being barraged with lyrics.

The tale of Donnie & Joe Emerson is a heartening one for creative dreamers. The young Washington farm boys’ self-produced 1979 album was initially an expensive flop. But when it was rediscovered in 2008, it became critically lauded—and was eventually reprinted.

Rounding out our old-school quartet is Billy Fury:

The track’s playful bassline again stops short of forcing you to dance, but it might just put a smile on your face.

Zone out

Shifting gears, the warm samples of this Land of the Loops mix chart our path toward more electronic fare. It’s a pleasant balance of placid and wistful that leaves plenty of room for the mind to drift.

There’s just one word for this jam by English producer Forest Swords: hypnotic. Your humble blogger is frequently known to write with his phone in airplane mode and a Forest Swords record like Dagger Paths or Fjree Feather on the turntable.

Hewing still to instrumentals, we turn next to a recent collaboration by Louisiana producers Suicideyear and Outthepound. Though he’s known for working with rappers, Suicideyear’s careful blends of synth and 808 are often just right to quiet a restless mind.

We conclude our instrumental run with post-rock majesty. This Will Destroy You’s Young Mountain was recently reissued for the album’s tenth anniversary, and patiently building tracks like “Happiness: We’re All In It Together” hold up beautifully.

Transcend

The haunting voice of the late Patricia Keenan shepherds us into the final movement of our playlist. A departure from Broadcast’s noisier tunes, “Tears in the Typing Pool” is a memorable work of understated sadness.

After two decades apart, the English shoegaze outfit Slowdive reunited in 2014, and is poised to release a new album this May. The gently swelling teaser single, “Sugar for the Pill,” is the kind of song to carry you through whatever tribulations Monday might hold.

Colleen Green knows a thing or two about anxious nerves, as evidenced in tracks like “Deeper Than Love,” her arresting meditation on a fear of intimacy. That makes the conclusion to her 2015 album, I Want to Grow Up, all the more remarkable: “Whatever I Want” finds Green feeling unencumbered, just like you want on a Sunday night.

Finally, before she became the guitarist for the house band on Late Night with Seth Meyers, Marnie Stern was known for shredding.

Stern’s resplendent fingerwork is in effect on “The Things You Notice,” a lovely paean that leaves us ready to take on the workweek.

6 Fictional Presidents Who Were Great Communicators

Happy Presidents’ Day! On this day when the United States honors their commander in chief, we thought it would be fun to look at the fictional portrayals of this office throughout pop culture history. We’ve found that many presidents from books, television, and film were excellent orators, and some may have surpassed even the most loquacious POTUS of their age. Here are some of our favorites, and we want to hear yours in the comments.

1 President Jed Bartlett

President Bartlett will always have a warm place in the American television universe as a warm, reasoned leader. Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing, created the “walk and talk,” which President Bartlett executed beautifully throughout the series. With Sam Seaborn’s help, he also was a powerhouse of an orator, with several powerful addresses to the (fake) American people on the importance of democratic freedoms.

2 President Douglass Dilman

via GIPHY

You can’t argue with James Earl Jones’s powers of speech, and his powerful portrayal of the first (fictional) black president is powerful. The scene in which his character has his first press conference is especially powerful, and shows the understated power of President Dilman’s oration.

3 President Mackenzie Allen

Who doesn’t love a good presidential drama (that’s heavy on the drama)? The first (fictional) female president was also a very direct, occasionally blunt straight shooter.. Geena Davis’s no-nonsense approach to communication should be a model for straight-talkers everywhere.

4 President Thomas J. Whitmore

This speech has become so famous with sci-fi fans that its only near rival is a similar speech from Armageddon, which pales in comparison to President Whitmore’s gravitas. Although the president is not the main focus of Independence Day, he is quite the motivator.

5 President Francis Underwood

via GIPHY

Although Kevin Spacey’s president in House of Cards is undoubtedly diabolical, he’s also great at communicating with an audience. Whether he’s making a speech to accept a presidency he wasn’t elected to or breaking the fourth wall to address his Netflix viewers, President Underwood can command a room.

6 President David Palmer

President Palmer’s voice is one of the most authoritative on this list, and his question, “Is my voice shaking?”, will give you chills. Although 24 skews dramatic, the level of “candor and clarity” Palmer keeps throughout the series is impressive.

Who are your favorite fictional world leaders? Post your favorites in the comments below.

What Kind of Writing Do You Use at the Office?

Persons vs. People vs. Peoples—What’s the Difference?

Most of the time, people is the correct word to choose as a plural for person. Persons is archaic, and it is safe to avoid using it, except in legal writing, which has its own traditional language. Peoples is only necessary when you refer to distinct ethnic groups (for example, within the same region).

“People” vs. “Persons” as Plurals

Person and people both derive from Latin, but from different words. Person came from persona, which first meant “mask,” like that worn by an actor, but eventually came to mean “an individual human.” People, on the other hand, came from populus, which means “the people” in the sense of a group from the same nation, community, or ethnic group.

There was a time in history when it was put forward that grammatically, persons should be the preferred plural any time more than one person was referred to as a countable noun, and people should be preferred for uncountable nouns. That practice did not become standard, and nowadays, the plural persons is only considered correct in legal contexts and, occasionally, when deliberately referring to humans individually rather than collectively.

Eighty people came to my Star Wars costume party on May the fourth.

Six persons came dressed as either Princess Leia or Darth Vader, but the rest of the people were all wookies. (Acceptable because the persons’ individual choices are relevant to the context.)

Six people came dressed as either Princess Leia or Darth Vader, but the rest of the people were all wookies. (Equally acceptable)

More people should recycle their paper to save trees.

Why don’t more people realize that capybaras are rodents?

Sixteen people protested on the White House lawn this Saturday.

”Persons” or “People” in Formal Legal Writing

In the legal world, including law enforcement, persons is used regularly. It is helpful because nothing is collective where the law is concerned; individuals are prosecuted, not groups. Some legal expressions, such as persons of interest and missing persons, reflect this grammatical preference. Some people use persons in writing that is legal-sounding, but not strictly legal by definition, such as rules and public notices.

Any person or persons vandalizing courthouse property will be fined.

There are two persons of interest being questioned for the murder of John Doe.

The Douglas County Police Department has seventeen open missing persons cases.

No more than six persons can occupy the hot tub at any one time.

One political context in which persons is correct is in the expression displaced persons.

Visas will be expedited for refugees and displaced persons.

Using persons outside of legal contexts can sound unnecessarily affected. Avoid it completely in business contexts.

To the persons who stole my muffins from the break room: I will be avenged. (A bit silly, given the offense.)

Persons who retain our services will be charged a monthly fee.

Those who retain our services will be charged a monthly fee.

“People” vs. “Peoples” for Ethnic Groups and Nationalities

When you refer to the people of a single ethnic group or nationality, always use the word people.

The people of China no longer need to abide by the one-child policy.

Emmanuel Macron was elected by the people of France on May 7, 2017.

“We here highly resolve that government of the people, for the people, and by the people will not perish from the earth.” (Abraham Lincoln)

Peoples is only used in cases when it is necessary to distinguish between ethnic groups within the same geographical or cultural context.

The Israeli and Palestinian peoples have long been at war.

The peoples of the world practice a wide variety of religions.

“Persons,” “People,” or “Peoples”?

The plural of person should be people in the vast majority of contexts, although legalese uses the plural persons. Peoples should be reserved for instances where you are referring to more than one distinct ethnic group.

Where Do You Write for Work?

11 More Experts on How to Write Well This Year

In theory, writing is not hard labor. It’s less backbreaking than laying bricks all day, for instance. And compared to the average herpetologist, most writers’ workplaces involve far fewer smelly rooms full of snakes. For that, we should be grateful.

Still, writing is hard work. And that’s just as true for vaunted authors with numerous books, awards, and honorary degrees to their credit as it is for newcomers who only recently resolved to hammer out more words each week. If any of that sounds like you—if you’re looking to step up that content game—we have help, in the form of recent pointers and perspectives from veteran writers.

1 Read, write, rinse, repeat.

This battle-tested rule stands true whether you’re a longform magazine writer or a horror novelist. Asked how a newcomer can perfect the craft, the National Book Award–winning author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates tweeted this response:

“Reading. Then writing. Rinsing. Repeating. Only way. Not even snarking. It really is.” https://twitter.com/tanehisicoates/status/814949934470483968

Be relentless.

2 Schedule meetings with yourself.

It’s easy to daydream about things you’d like to write, but sometimes harder to carve out time each day to, you know, actually write them. When writing the critically acclaimed Don’t Think Twice, comic Mike Birbiglia says he struggled with procrastination:

I had the movie in my head, but I wasn’t writing it. But I noticed this trend in my life, which was that I was showing up to lunch meetings or business meetings, but I wasn’t showing up to meet myself. So I wrote a note next to my bed — this is so corny, but I wrote, “Mike! You have an appointment at Café Pedlar at 7 a.m. with your mind!” It’s so corny, and I would show up! I never didn’t show up, and I wrote this movie [in] spurts of essentially three hours, like I’d write from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m., and the reason why I would do that is because I was essentially barely awake. Because I feel like that moment, at 7 to 10 a.m., you’re not afraid of the world yet.

3 Have a plan.

For John McPhee, the prolific author, octogenarian, and veritable institution at The New Yorker, writing hinges on structure: taking the various puzzle pieces floating around in one’s mind and notes, and figuring out in what order to arrange them. (A puzzle becomes much easier to assemble when you know what it’s a picture of, after all.)

In crafting an outline, McPhee does not save the ending for last. Whether the piece will be five thousand words or five thousand sentences, he decides on his ending almost as soon as he’s settled on a lead sentence. Still, he concedes the work that ensues in between is, alas, rarely simple:

Almost always there is considerable tension between chronology and theme, and chronology traditionally wins. The narrative wants to move from point to point through time, while topics that have arisen now and again across someone’s life cry out to be collected. They want to draw themselves together in a single body, in the way that salt does underground. But chronology usually dominates. As themes prove inconvenient, you find some way to tuck them in.

We’ll come back to McPhee in a moment.

4 “Don’t be trapped by your limits. Get creative.” —Eric Heisserer

Screenwriter Eric Heisserer spent years slogging through drafts of a script for the film Arrival on spec before finding the right backers. One struggle was depicting how the aliens in his film would communicate; he later recalled of this frustration: “My omnipresent self-critic mocked me for running out of words to describe actual language.”

Then his wife had the brilliant idea to just include rough sketches of alien logograms right in the script—But Heisserer soon discovered no screenwriting software at the time could include graphics. Ultimately he settled on a work-around that involved re-inserting the images each time a revised draft went out. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked.

5 It’s okay to take breaks.

Not everyone is cut out to write entire chapters in a single sitting. “I think if you work beyond four hours it goes bad,” novelist Zadie Smith recently remarked.

In other words, don’t stress if your entire opus doesn’t come pouring out of your fingertips the moment you sit down at the keyboard. Even just getting to 800 words, Smith says, “feels like a champion day.”

6 Back your work up.

Laptops disappear. Hard drives crash. Buildings sometimes burn—leaving determined writers to charge past firefighters into the blazes to rescue their finished novels.

“THIS IS WHY WE DO CLOUD STORAGE, PEOPLE” https://twitter.com/FutureBoy/status/776531179059093505

It’s worth taking precautions to make sure, whatever else might go wrong, that your work survives intact.

7 Take your lumps, and keep at it.

Long before he was awarded a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” novelist Junot Díaz labored over a series of short stories for his peers in a grad-school workshop. His first effort there endured the kind of savage reviews that sometimes compel people to change professions:

Workshop rolls around and I still remember the feeling on my face as I watched my story get gutted. I’d caught beatdowns before, but this one was a graduate workshop beatdown and I felt those lumps for days. Sure, there was some mild praise about the setting and a few of my lines got checkmarks next to them, but the overwhelming reaction was negative.

Díaz stuck with it, inhaling huge volumes of short fiction each day, and persisting even after his second attempt met tepid responses. Battling through it all, Díaz discovered something about himself as a writer—something that stayed with him well through the publication of his first book.

8 Don’t wait for anyone to give you permission.

Anyone can be a writer. But before she was a Pulitzer-winning novelist, most recently grinding out the 736-page Barkskins, this would’ve been a surprise to Annie Proulx, as she once told The Paris Review:

I never thought of myself as a writer. I only backed into it through having to make a living. And then I discovered that I could actually do it. I thought there was some arcane fellowship that you knew at birth that you had to belong to in order to be a writer.

Don’t wait. Start now.

9 Be good to yourself.

Even wildly popular novelists who start working before 6 a.m. (looking at you, J.K. Rowling) aren’t above writing from the comfort of bed:

“Wake up, drag the laptop into bed and get to work. There’s really no need for formal attire.” https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/811579300021489664

Taking care of yourself doesn’t just mean finding the coziest place to operate, though. Daily exercise is a part of the process many writers swear by. From Haruki Murakami to Joyce Carol Oates, many specifically advocate running to help untangle the writerly knots of the mind.

10 Forgive yourself when it doesn’t come easy.

Science writer Elizabeth Kolbert says her latest book, The Sixth Extinction, was at times painful to work on: “I thought it was going to do me in, at points. It just wasn’t coming together.”

That a longtime journalist of Kolbert’s caliber still feels tested by the craft should hearten anyone who’s struggling to keep up with its attendant pressures and deadlines.

While piecing together the story was an arduous, years-long trek that took her everywhere from the Great Barrier Reef to a cloud forest in the Andes, Kolbert’s efforts ultimately paid off. Despite being “way overdue,” when it was finally done, the book went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.

11 Know when to stop.

A bonus from the aforementioned John McPhee, who plans his endings from the outset: You have to not only finish the piece but also conclude the process around it. Editing, it’s sometimes said, is the art of knowing when to stop tinkering.

People often ask how I know when I’m done—not just when I’ve come to the end, but in all the drafts and revisions and substitutions of one word for another how do I know there is no more to do? When am I done? I just know. I’m lucky that way. What I know is that I can’t do any better; someone else might do better, but that’s all I can do; so I call it done.

With diligence, you can carry your writing goals across the finish line. Grammarly will be there cheering you on.