Do people really do *this*?

[lindaland]

On a teamwork platform (not Upwork) there are suggestions and quotes while the page loads. 

Today it said, "To make a word or phrase bold put an asterisk before and after it. *Be Bold*"

My reaction was, yikes. As an editor, I am constantly editing out "quotation marks" around words for "emphasis". 

In all of my years of training and experience, words and phrases themselves stand out based on the way they are written. Of course in rare cases to make a word bold, you could actually make it bold. 

So is this just an online content thing? Or am I just old? In my mind I see future books coming to me to be edited now with asterisks all over the place. 

[prestonhunter]

Linda:

I am a computer programmer who does most of my work using a text editor.

It is not a word processor.

So there is no text formatting... no "bold" or "italics", etc.

Asterisks, quotes, and capitalization will not disappear when a block of text is moved from one format to another, such as if it is stored as a value in a simple varchar database column.

So I have a great appreciation for the use of pure ASCII text for communications.

[spaghetts1]

 I'm not sure what you are trying to say in your post. What do you suggest for freelancers who need to emphasize a word? Type it in all caps? This can be misinterpreted by people as negative. I think that at the very least, a freelancer should be able to italicize a word without having to go to the trouble of adding asterisks before and after. Very clumsy. I find it interesting that formatting is available in this forum but not in a message.

Spoiler

[versailles]

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@Ronni V wrote:

I find it interesting that formatting is available in this forum but not in a message. 

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Formatting is allowed in Upwork's messages service. The way to trigger it is through markdown.

*italics* will show: italics

**bold** will show: bold

Freelancers who are against markdown can decide not to use it.

[versailles]

Many tools used for forums or online messaging use this type of formatting codes. If you want a word in bold you put it between *. For instance, if I type *hello*,  the output will be: hello.

I think the Upwork messaging system work that way.

So yes, many people do this.

[charles_kozierok]

The use of asterisks to emphasize goes back decades to BBSes, Usenet and other modes of textual communication where only plain characters were available.

It actually took me years to unlearn the habit of doing this on newer BBSes.. and then once I had it licked, they started programming them to turn asterisked text into bold anyway. 🙂

[richard_wein]

This formatting feature can be a nuisance when you want your asterisks or underscore characters to appear as you've typed them, and NOT be treated as formatting marks. Now that I'm aware of the problem I can get around it, at my end, by marking a block of text as code.

A client recently sent me some JSON code in the Messages app, to use in trying out his web API. I wasted a couple of hours trying to work out why the API was returning an (uninformative) error message, before I realised that the code was supposed to contain some underscore characters, which the Messages app had interpreted as formatting marks and stripped out. (I should have been altered by the fact that one word of the JSON code was bold, but I didn't notice it.)

Yet another reason for switching to email.

[richard_wein]

"I should have been altered..."

Thank you, Swype keyboard, you're quite right: I should indeed have been altered. But what I meant to say was "altered".

[richard_wein]

Dammit... Not "altered". Alerted!

[luce-neidert]

Tried to use *this* but it didn't do much....

[creativedigit]

Linda,

This means the platform in question supports Markdown. Markdown is especially helpful when you want to highlight a piece of information for future reference. For instance, the todo list application of my choice - Todoist - supports Markdown. When I jot down a new task, sometimes I attach information to the comments section for myself (not for the public). I often find myself using Markdown to format things while I'm typing. It gives me the advantage of structuring the info the way I want and when I review, later on, my eye will quickly spot the sections I highlighted in the first place, this way I don't have to re-read the entire thing to remember what I needed to get done and rely on minimal information only to refresh my memory.

If you read it, as a writer, you will probably hate it, however, for me personally, this is a deal breaker.

Hope this helps.