: Re: Multiple ways to emphasise words tl;dr : I need a way to emphasise the names of special skills without it becoming annoying or it overlapping with the formatting already present in the story.

@Sims2267584

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There are a couple of ways that you could utilize, but changing the style often comes with problems. Some of these problems you have already encountered:

bold text is very nice to draw attention to something, but it's the kind of attention that draws the eyes of the reader across the whole page - be careful about using this too often; it's nice to emphasize something or to use it for one or two really powerful (think Endboss) spells, but you probably shouldn't use it every single time
italics are a nice way to show a difference while not being as invasive as bold text; the problem is that italics are sometimes used for different things like you already outlined, which might confuse a reader
underlining text is another possibility, but especially in these times of e-books you should be careful to not make your text look like a Hyperlink or explanation; this is rarely used and distracts quite a bit; if you have Hyperlinks in addition to underlining skills things will get complicated and confusing for the reader really fast

Other ways to emphasize stuff could be:

use a different font, such as a Monospace font; Monospace is not as nice to read for most people, but they allow you to have a simple way of showing that something is different; by writing your skills in a Monospace font it will be very easy for readers to see that something is different, even if it's the first time they encounter it as a change in font is used very rarely in fictinal writing
use a catch phrase to show that what follows is a skill; it could be that you just spell the word "Skill" like "Skill: Stand Behind Me" or abbreviated to an "S"; this is pretty easy and after using this one or two times nobody will be confused; it does add a bit of extra stuff to read and to remember when writing though and it's not necessarily the nicest thing to read; in an RPG context it might not be such a big problem though
use other kinds of brackets/ quotation marks/... such as Guillemets ("« Stand Behind Me »") or simply an additional hyphen ("- Stand Behind Me -"); in these cases you could also remove the normal quotation marks to make it more obvious that this is not something that is spoken if you don't have spoken incantations; just be careful, different countries use different kinds of brackets/quotation marks and it might lead to weird results depending on your target audience
CAPSLOCK is normally used to indicate someone screaming or for example describing how an advertisement is written in big letters; it could be used to indicate that something is different as long as you don't use it in one of those other contexts, but it draws quite a bit of attention - not as much as bold text, but more than italics
lowercaps looks a bit like typos at first, but if you continually use it your readers will quickly pick up on it (thanks to Kevin for the suggestion)
CamelCaps looks probably quite weird for every non-programmer, but would be an effective way to establish your incantations in contrast to normal speech
write it in the middle of the line to establish a difference from everything else that is being said; this draws a lot of attention and can get boring fast if you are regularly using skills; but if they are something rare and special it could be useful; just be aware of the draw attention across the whole page effect similar to bold text
use a different size if you want to make sure that it's different from the surrounding speech; this is similar to capslock, but not quite as invasive if you are only increasing the font size by one or two points (can also be used with smaller/lowercase, but that would make a skill less special, so I'd recommend against it)
use a different language if all your communication will be in English and the target audience is only in English-speaking countries you could choose for example German spells; just be careful that German fans might find Fan-translations and find you spells a bit weird; you could of course try to create your own language snippets (no need for a complete language) and offer a "translation" the first time and in a glossary at the back; as long as the snippets are sufficiently different your readers will know what your protagonist has just cast after maybe two or three times; it's of course more work, a bit harder on the reader and might potentially limit your reader base

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