Text Emphasis and Style

Bold Text

Use bold text (sparingly) to provide clear visual emphasis without overwhelming learners. Bold text draws attention to high-priority content and can help guide students through instructions or important takeaways. Apply bold formatting in these situations:

Labels and interface terms such as buttons, tabs, or menu items within the LMS or external tools.

Terms or definitions that you want students to recognize quickly when skimming, especially in lesson summaries.

Italics

Use italics sparingly to add nuance or place stress on a word or short phrase within a sentence.

Also use italic formatting for these special types of content:

• Titles of standalone works such as books, films, or journals. Example: “The Lean Startup outlines principles of iterative business development.”
• Titles of figures, including charts, graphs, maps, photographs, etc. Example: “Figure: Map of Major Earthquake Zones in the Pacific Rim”
• Foreign words or phrases that are not commonly used in English. Example: “The Japanese term kaizen means ‘continuous improvement.’”
• First use of a key term or phrase, followed by a definition. Example: “The concept of procedural justice refers to the fairness of the processes that lead to legal outcomes, not just the outcomes themselves.”
• Internal thoughts, hypothetical language, or scenario-based text in case studies. Example: “What would I do in this situation? the manager wondered.”
• Statistical symbols and algebraic variables. Example: The relationship was statistically significant (p < .05), with a moderate effect size (r = .42).
• Anchors on a scale. Example: Participants rated their agreement on a 5-point scale ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree.

Capitalization

Proper Nouns

Always capitalize proper nouns and words referring to race or ethnicity (e.g., “Mexican American,” “Black,” “White,” “Indigenous”).

Some words can be common or proper nouns, depending on their context.

Title Case

Use title case for

• Titles of publications or media, i.e., books, articles, videos. (Note: Title case is used when these titles appear in main body of the narrative. In reference lists, use sentence case.)
• Module titles and headings.
• References to headings within course text. Example: “Refer to the Instructions section.”
• Titles of tests, measures, and subscales.
• Titles of tables and figures.

When using title case, capitalize major words—including pronouns—and words that are four or more letters long. Do not capitalize articles, short prepositions, or conjunctions that are three letters or fewer.

Sentence Case

Use sentence case in reference list entries for the titles of articles , books, webpages, videos or any other published work, even if title case was used in the original work.

When using sentence case, capitalize:

• The first word of the title or heading.
• The first word after a colon or em dash.
• Nouns followed by numbers or letters.
• Proper nouns.