No hate, only curiosity. Exactly what it says in the title. If you’re a roleplayer who bolds/italicizes all of their character’s spoken word (rather than emphasis), why do you do so? I’ve seen several players do it but don’t understand, and I’d like to.
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I don’t do it, but I think it’s done to indicate tone. I mean, if I was supposed to sound like Optimus Prime I’d probably bold all my speech.
Or italicize if I were a sneaky, untrustworthy Skeksis.
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Preparing an Optimus Prime cosplay for one of my characters RIGHT NOW
I have only seen a few folk on Wolfery do this (bold everything, that is), but in every instance it boils down to a single character archetype in my experience: large (often wolf) villains with fragile Dom-personalities and main character syndrome.
Personally, I find it a bit jarring when the formatting tools are abused like that. It makes it seem like the player feels that their character’s words are so much more important than everyone else’s that instead of putting effort into painting an IC picture of the character’s speech mannerism and impact, they forcibly subject the other players to just crudely hilighting their own text.
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I normally use italics to emphasise particular words in a sentence, but I’ve never seen it used for the whole speech in a character’s post. 
It may have something to do with personal preference, but on the other hand I can see it as being a means for the player to be able to more easily differentiate their spoken words from their narrative interactions. Sometimes, reading paragraphs (or just big blocks of text in general) is hard or straining on the eyes.
In some ways, it’s easier to see when your character is talking when you highlight all of it exclusively with bold or italics. Nothing wrong with that imo. 
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Oh gosh. Back on old chat rooms, everyone could have their own font and style and size… some people used scripts to change it on every character so they’d have bouncy rainbows or edgy shadows. It was a visual cacophony. Just total, discordant typographical chaos. And we loved it. XD Perhaps it’s something similar, though? Just a way to distinguish one’s post in a stylistically droning wall of text.
For a specific character of mine I use the italised (if that is the word) text. Why?
Is not a clear voice, it has a bit of an echo, and the italics gives me a better idea of an echo, I don’t know if it makes much sense, but I bet you can read these two in different ways:
“I have been well, thanks!”
“I have been well, thanks!”
So I use it to change the “voice” of this character, but for others I use it to make a word stand out, and bold is for intense shouting, roars of monsters or anything that roars and other onomatopoeia.
I italicise intonations, so it’s more like specific words rather than the whole sentences. Still, I’d go with italic over a whole paragraph to denote something like singing.
ℑ 𝔰𝔭𝔢𝔞𝔨 𝔬𝔫𝔩𝔶 𝔦𝔫 𝔉𝔯𝔞𝔨𝔱𝔲𝔯, 𝔣𝔬𝔯 ℑ 𝔞𝔪 𝔱𝔥𝔞𝔱 𝔰𝔢𝔯𝔦𝔬𝔲𝔰.
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For me it’s a force of habit. I spent a lot of time on rp forums years ago, and proper text formatting was one of the most common rules. Makes sense, as forum posts are usually larger in size, and blocks of text can be straining on the eyes.
Generally it was:
Bold for your character’s speech.
Italics for thoughts and internal monologue.
Underlined (doesn’t exist on Wolfery afaik) for NPC speech and when you quote previous posts.
While Wolfery’s posts aren’t usually that big, I still find it very useful to make my posts easier to read.
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If boldface made things easier to read, the muck would automatically make everything boldface. To make things easier to read. It makes certain text more prominent. That’s not the same thing.
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Do you always expect everyone to make the best decisions, especially when it comes to subjective things like design? For different people, different things are preferable.
It does make some parts of the text more prominent, indeed. The parts that are already different by default.
If you want me to expand on it, I will give you examples on why that can be important.
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No, I expect things to generally evolve toward optimization when ways are broadly agreed on to be an improvement.
On a related subject, this company seems to think that bolding initial parts of words is better:
I have so far not run across Bionic Reading in the wild outside of an RSS reader called Reeder.
And one person in particular disagrees that Bionic Reading does anything for readability:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691824001811
First, let’s agree to not discuss features this site should or should not have. I feel like we’re approaching that topic, which I see unnecessary.
My case is, that description, speech and thoughts have different purposes in a text and need to be separated in some way. For example,
“Hello.” said John.
- Hello, - said John.
Both are viable and used more or less frequently depending on language and region. But now let’s extrapolate to a more complex case. Let’s try weaving two blocks together.
“Hello.” said John, raising his coffee mug to his lips. “How is your morning?”
Excuse my crude example, but let’s imagine that both speech blocks are a full sentence (or several) big, and so is the description block in the middle. And that happens several times across every other post. Would you find that easy on eyes to read? Or would you be sometimes confused which parts of that are speech and what are description? The " symbol doesn’t have left and right sides.
"Hello." said John, raising his coffee mug to his lips. "How is your morning?"
Would you agree that this becomes more readable than plain text once complexity of it increases?
“Well enough.” Sarah replied. ‘What an ugly coffee mug,’ she thought. “Pour me some too, please.”
"Well enough" Sarah replied. What an ugly coffee mug. "Pour me some too, please.
Or, if we’ve already established that narration is focused on Sarah
"Well enough" What an ugly coffee mug. "Pour me some too, please."
I’m not saying everyone should do that. I’m only explaining why I prefer to do that myself.
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My intent was to use site formatting as an example of the sort of thing that would be common if there was general agreement that this usage of boldface enhanced readability.
I’m going to assume in the first example that you were bitten by Markdown formatting and intended hyphens on either side of what John is saying. Be that as it may that it may be standard usage elsewhere, I don’t see that variation often at all. It’s nonstandard in English. I’m not entirely sure where off the top of my head, but it might be an unusual variation of French conventions, or perhaps used in fiction writing to alienate speech in some fashion.
I do disagree that the second complex example is more readable. Although " does not have right sides in the glyph itself, it’s easy for me to see which one is an open quote and a close quote because, in each of the examples you provided, whitespace provides an elegant cue as to which side is which. At the beginning of a paragraph, the whitespace is the margin; at the end of a sentence, the whitespace is that which precedes the next word. There’s no space between the open quote and the first letter, nor one between the final punctuation mark and the close quote.
On the communication of thoughts, what you’re describing is closer to established convention, although usage I’ve seen doesn’t use single quotes, which are more often used when nesting quotes.
“Well enough,” Sara replied. What an ugly coffee mug, she thought.
And as you say, something like that for the first usage of a convention; a block of repeated thoughts tends to drop the verb.
Sarah took a sip of her tea, and carefully stifled a grimace. This tea needs help, too. Who adds mustard to tea?
And from a practical standpoint, bolding everything like that also makes it harder to emphasize text in ways that let it stand out.
“No!” Sarah snapped. “Keep the ketchup away from my tea!”
Note too that I’m trying to be careful to speak in terms of “standard” and “nonstandard,” rather than “right” and “wrong.” Without an institution like L’Académie Française to oversee that sort of thing, English does change over time, and punctuation conventions are no exception. It may be that someday, this will be de rigueur in English. For now, however, many will see this convention as idiosyncratic.
Difference between our points is, you speak from perspective of academical rules of punctuation, while I, not an English native speaker, from conventions of RP forums. We also both assume everyone is infallible to mistakes and misspellings, which can’t be true for casual writing. Some people put spaces on both sides of " symbol, some mess up formatting. But regardless, we aren’t trying to make people follow some specific rules, are we?
Yes, you can’t make bold text even bolder, that is true. But you can mix different ways of formatting and make a word both bold and italic.
Returning to the fact this site doesn’t enforce academic English rules or any specific formatting disciplines. People write casually, not competitively, so it’s only natural that different styles emerge.
I think I have defended my style of writing, while you proved why it’s not for everyone. I suggest leaving this where it is, unless you have something to add.
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I’m weirdly fascinated by the notion of competitive writing.
And I agree, I think both our points are sufficiently made.
We have different preferences, clearly, but nonetheless, I appreciate that you (and everyone else in this thread) care enough about mechanics and the like to stop by and discuss it here. Quite a lot of people don’t.
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There’s an interesting question to be raised here: who are you doing it for? Yourself? You just wrote the text so you shouldn’t have too much trouble recalling what it says at a glance. No, what I think is happening is that you are going out of your way to force that style onto others to read in. As seen in this thread it is at least a matter of stylistic preference if not literary convention, and it should be up to each reader how to make it most readable for themselves, not up to the writer to decide that this way is the way people should be reading.
Another good question is why don’t books do this? They spend a lot of money on the typesetting to begin with. Even YA books or genres that are supposed to be easy to approach don’t do this in general as far as I’ve seen.
I was actually considering implementing automated formatting of dialogue into WIMP, but making everything bold was not a style that I even considered for that. I think I might also add unbolding dialogue as an option to that.
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I strongly disagree. It is the job of the writer to make text readable for the reader, though we might disagree on what is and isn’t readable or appropriate. My purpose of creating this thread was to understand why some people choose to present their text in a certain way and Yhapatch has given a full and reasonable answer, even defending their points. It’s my opinion that your accusation of the individual’s use of force is against the spirit of the thread.
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