Why Every Word Can't Be the Important One
Somewhere along the way, bold text stopped being a tool and became a tic. It shows up in technical docs, business memos, and blog posts — often introduced or amplified by LLMs that seem to think a paragraph without emphasis is a paragraph without meaning. But the more liberally you apply bold, the less it does. Typography works on contrast; when everything is highlighted, nothing stands out.
The Typography of Emphasis
Writers have a few ways to stress a word or phrase: bold, italics, capitals, and underlines. Caps are widely recognized as shouting, and using them broadly tends to undermine confidence in the argument. Underlines have effectively been claimed by hyperlinks, so they're rarely a stylistic option anymore. Both capitals and underlines have a mechanical history — you could produce them with a typewriter or a pen. Bold and italics only became practical with word-processors.
Italics are the lighter touch. They don't jump off the page, so they work well within long passages where you want to set something apart without breaking the reader's flow. Used for emphasis, they register only when someone actually reads the sentence, which makes them ideal for stress that fits naturally into the spoken rhythm of the prose.
Bold, by contrast, is most valuable when it catches the eye of someone who is skimming rather than reading. That's why headings are bold — they help a reader scan a document and find the section they need. But that power depends on restraint. Once bold appears in every other sentence, the eye has nothing to latch onto, and the skimming reader sees only noise.
Where Bold Works
One good use of bold in body text is to mark unfamiliar terms at the moment they're explained. This is a technique borrowed from Giarratano and Riley's work on expert systems. When an unfamiliar term reappears later, the reader can glance back through the text and find the bolded spot quickly to refresh their understanding. The key is to place the bold at the explanation, which is usually — but not always — the first use. Sometimes the term first appears in a list ("we carry out this process in three steps: frobning, gibbling, and eorchisting"), where it shouldn't be bolded; the emphasis belongs later, at the actual definition.
Bolding an important sentence so it stands out while skimming can work, but the same diminishing returns apply. Yet even that case is often better served by a callout. A callout draws the eye more effectively, and because it doesn't have to match the prose sentence-for-sentence, it can be worded more cleanly as a standalone idea.
A more questionable practice is bolding the first clause of every item in a bulleted list. It functions as a mini-heading, but lists don't usually need that — the bullet points themselves provide enough visual structure. Bullet lists are themselves overused; in many cases the same content would read better as a flowing paragraph, and part of the writing craft is making the explanation pleasant to read.
The temptation to demonstrate this by bold-ing every few words in this article was strong. But an example that makes the text unreadable undercuts the argument it's trying to make, so this discussion is confined to a single, restrained demonstration. And yes, text with this much bold exists in the wild.
