Crimes of Illiteracy

Your reader insulted

boldface type, underlined text, italics, capital letters, large fonts, unnecessary colors, and other insulting decorations

Believe it or not, I can understand words such as "not" and "only" even if they're not bold, underlined, italicized, capped, huge, and red. Lately there's been this necessity, on the part of presumptuous writers, to put catch words - heck, even whole sentences or paragraphs - in some sort of distracting type. Apparently, they assume people are too stupid to realize that these words are there.

This is not to say that there's never a use for these styles. They're perfectly fine in prose or scripts, where certain words might need to be emphasized for clarity. And it's fine to use them to call attention to headers, examples, and other such items.

But wouldn't you rather be told that you "must" do something than that you "MUST"? Or that something is "not" applicable than that it's "not"? It reminds me of those annoying kids back in the early 1990s who, when you said something they believed was false, would retort, "Not!"

The word "not" means "not." The word "NOT" means nothing different - all it does is assume that readers don't know what "not" means. (When I see "NOT," I try to figure out what the initialism stands for.) If you must use bold, underline, and so forth to call attention to simple words, expect that people will be insulted. I certainly will not approve.