PotatoGuy on 13/6/2009 at 22:51
After four months reading posts, i have the feeling people from England and the USA never use accent marks if they want to emphasize words.
If you want to emphasize a word in a sentence to give the sentence a certain meaning, Dutch people always use accent marks. Being Dutch, when I write a post I sometimes want to use accent marks but then it looks stupid on English words.
So my question(s): DO you people use accent marks occasionally, DOES it looks stupid when someone uses it and when you don't use question marks, what do you use to emphasize? CAPITALS? Underlining?
Aja on 13/6/2009 at 23:43
We never emphasize with accent marks because none exist in written English. For formal writing, italicizing words is about all we can do, but that only works when used sparingly. Informally, capitals are okay, but they tend to connote SHOUTING. Some people like to put words between /backslashes/, but I am not a fan of this approach.
Salvage on 13/6/2009 at 23:45
I tend to use bold or italics.
fett on 13/6/2009 at 23:50
I USE CAPS ALL THE TIME BECAUSE EVERYTHING I SAY IS IMPORTANT
Fingernail on 13/6/2009 at 23:54
On the other hand, if you start a heavy metal band, it's necessary to emphasize your originality with a well placed accent mark or two.
redface on 13/6/2009 at 23:55
I usually don't have anything to say.
Nameless Voice on 14/6/2009 at 00:20
What do you even mean by accent marks? I assume you mean putting the word in question inside quotes, like 'this'? That is generally used to denote that the person writing the word in quotes doesn't think that the term is correct. For example, a person might play a game that is generally classified as a horror game, and call it "a 'horror' game" to indicate that he disagrees with it being termed as horror.
Emphasis is generally done with italics or bold, or possibly with underlines (though underlines are used more to highlight a sentence rather than a single word.)
I've come across some people who apparently put accents over all the letters in the word, but I don't think that's for emphasis, that's just because they don't know how to write properly.
Aja on 14/6/2009 at 00:32
Using quotation marks in place of a more accurate word is generally bad form anyway.
SD on 14/6/2009 at 01:02
Aja, you are such a "card"
Tonamel on 14/6/2009 at 01:08
Quote Posted by Aja
We never emphasize with accent marks because none exist in written English.
And because of this, there are no characters with accents on our keyboards. So even when we come across the random word that needs one (because we stole it from French, like melée, cliché, or Pokémon), we generally just go without, because it's a pain to put them in.
