Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-6863431-20150103062825/@comment-11188061-20150423055231

Depends.

If you're following official book standard you never use bolds at all. This is because '!' is usually enough to symbolize a general exclamation, and caps enough to emphasize unusually loud ones.

But that is only applicable to books. On a screen things are much different, and the alignment on FF.Net is to have the words stretch from one side of the screen to the other, which is much wider than what you have in any kind of books. In this case a new problem is presented: People's attention span are shorter because they read more words per sentence, and combined with a white-to-black background color scheme feel less from the words itself and require stronger attraction to keep themselves immersed in the story.

Bolds help to that. Once in a while when you want to make a really strong statement (or in this case a strong exclamation) you use that rather than just capitals to retain the feeling you want people to feel lost due to the natural formatting of the webpage.

Used to be that people use Markdown like this *a* to do their emphasis (whether it's bold or italic) literally. Of course it automatically converts the words to its attached style.

Luckily Italics are different enough that its usage remain fairly straightforward (thoughts and change in tone) but people still mix it with loudness sometimes. ''Kaboom! ''for example, is italication used to describe an unusual sound effect. Whether you want to capitalize or bold or use all 3 together is debatable, although preferably once you stick to a style you must be consistent with it.