Emphasis

There seems to be a lot of confusion over the best way to emphasize words or phrases.

Don't you LOVE this song?

Don't you love this song?

Don't you love this song?

Don't you love this song?

Don't you looooove this song?

Don't you love this song?!

Or occasionally you get someone who just can't contain themselves and tries to combine them all:

Don't you LOOOOVE this song?!

Needless to say, that's overkill.

Here's the thing about emphasis, though. Sometimes it's so obvious you don't even need to point it out. For example, the word love is sort of emphatic already. You don't just like the song or think it's OK; you love it. So technically, I would probably change the sentence to this:

Don't you love this song?

Yes, it's that simple, friends.

However, I understand that sometimes you are just soooo excited that you NEED to emphasize something in your writing. So let's make this easy and consistent.

Use italics.

That's it. Don't use all caps. That's a colloquial way of screaming. Don't use bold or underline. Don't use extra punctuation, and don't add extra letters.

Just use italics.

Thank you.