In writing memos, reports, presentations, and even online content, we sometimes want to highlight some points so they are not overlooked. Doing this properly can be a good practice. However, it can also be overdone, so that it has an opposite effect from the intended one.
For example, I learned yesterday that big, bold, red lettering on a web page is typically overlooked by readers. We have learned to associate such lettering with advertisements and even with gimmickry. I learned this from one of Jakob Neilsen’s eye-tracking studies: Fancy Formatting, Fancy Words = Looks Like a Promotion = Ignored.
Learning this caused me to make several changes to my site design. For example, my design had highlighted links to my free ebook and guitar music downloads, as follows:
Since it seemed to me that people might be viewing these as advertisements or gimmickry, I did away with the highlighting and now just have simple links to them. I also did away completely with the use of red links. Perhaps this is a bit of an over-reaction, but I certainly do not want people to think of my site as gimmickry, so the changes seemed necessary to me. (There’s probably nothing inherently wrong with red links … I just didn’t want to take any chances and wanted to go with a more conservative-looking site.)
So, what relevance does this have for you?
One example might be this: Perhaps you are writing a proposal to the senior management team and want to include some quotes from Einstein or another “thinker” that would support your points. That might be a good thing to do, or it might not be, depending in part on the length of the quote. I know that I tend to skim over long quotes, sometimes skipping them entirely. Maybe not everyone does this, but I think I’m pretty typical in that regard.
Similarly, if you bold a sentence in a paragraph, you’ll get my attention with it, but if you bold the whole paragraph, I’ll skim right over it (as may other readers).
You can probably think of other examples. I only wanted to make you aware that over-highlighting can lead to your key results being overlooked.