When EVERYTHING STANDS OUT, nothing does: typography, expectations and procedures

Writers often use typographical features such as capitalization, boldface or underlining to draw attention to particular words or phrases in a written text. In this article we use ideas from the relevance-theoretic pragmatic framework to discuss how use of typographical features may convey meaning and/or produce stylistic or literary effects in written texts. We show how typography, like prosody in spoken language, can be used intentionally to guide a reader‘s interpretation. We discuss a range of examples to show how typographical features are interpreted relative to the rest of the text and relative to the cultural norms and expectations associated with a particular language and writing system.