When underlines ruled, and italics were impossible

Modern word processing has completely changed the way we write. Typewriters might have been the standard up to the 1980s, but typing today feels like a totally different world. Many first-time authors hand in manuscripts that are heavily underlined.

How Modern Typing differs from the Typewriter Days

Proportional Spacing
Back in the typewriter era, every character took up the exact same amount of space, whether it was a skinny “i” or a wide “M.” Today’s digital fonts use proportional spacing, which simply means the letters take up the space they actually need. The result? Text that looks cleaner and is much easier to read.

Effortless editing
Fixing mistakes or rewriting something is easy on a computer. You can delete a word, move a paragraph, run spell check, it’s all instant. With a typewriter, though, every keystroke was permanent. If you made a mistake, you were dealing with correction tape, white-out, or starting the whole page over. It was definitely not as forgiving!

Flexible formatting
Modern writing programs give you endless formatting options: you can switch fonts, change colours, add styling and change it again until you are satisfied with the result. Most typewriters, however, only had one font (courier), unless you were fortunate to have a fancy machine like the IBM Selectric, which let you swap out typeballs for different typefaces.

A new workflow
Typing on a computer separates writing from printing. You can edit forever, save multiple drafts, and share your work digitally without ever touching a printer. Typewriting was a totally physical, one-and-done process: what you typed went straight onto the page, no takebacks.

Obsolete type settings from the age of the Typewriter

Why we used to use Underlining
Underlining wasn’t originally intended as a style choice; it was a workaround. Since typewriters couldn’t easily produce italics, writers underlined words to tell the printer, “Please set this in italics or bold later.” Once computers came along and allowed us to format text directly, the old underlining convention faded away.

Bold vs Underlining:

Many first-time authors hand in manuscripts that are heavily underlined. There are two reasons not to do so, firstly, because they come from the days of typewriters, where bold and variations in font were not optional. Secondly, because authors decide what is important in their content and want to stand out to their readers – here, we would caution authors not to assume that what is important to you is important to your readers. Just as one would watch a documentary with a group of other people and each person would have a different takeaway, so too with your book. Allow your audience to receive what they need from your book rather than enforcing it by heavily emboldened text. (This being said, a little bolded text here and there is acceptable.)

So, while bold text is better than underlining, and italic is important for emphasis, allow your readers the luxury of absorbing their own message from your material. This is why we have headings to highlight the main points we are trying to make.