: Re: How can I stress a certain word in a medium that doesn't allow for font embellishments? Many of us probably encountered it before on a social media like Facebook or Twitter, or in the comments

@Berryessa137

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An alternative to using _underscores_ to stress a word in a case where you'd normally use italics is to wrap the content in /slashes/. If nothing else, it's less likely to cause a miscommunication of its meaning than "quoting" and less likely to cause an unintentional emotional effect on the reader than USING ALL CAPS. It may be preferable if the other content you are writing contains underscores already, like website usernames:

Jeff87, pretty_pretty_princess, and Buffalos_Rule /all/ logged out.

But if you're writing something with a lot of slashes in it anyway, maybe _underscore_ or *asterisk* would cause less confusion.

I've never been there/seen it/done *anything* like that!

I suppose if you were going to include any asterisked disclaimers* you'd have to similarly choose what characters you want to use for emphasis carefully.

For me (and understanding that this is totally subjective), slashes have a similar effect as I read to italics -- causing emphasis, but somewhat gentler than underscores (my brain makes an extra pause around the word when I see those), asterisks (which I associate with a word being bolded), or all caps (which, depending on the context and how many words are capitalized, is like a more intense bolding or outright yelling).

* such as this one

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