Plain Text Nation: Why Today's Kids Think Italic is Suspicious

And how we lost the grammar of emphasis

We are all so amazed by AI that I would not be surprised if most people, particularly younger generations, are completely unaware of the outstanding, extraordinary, and absolutely earth-shattering impact on humankind caused by a fascinating technology currently taken for granted: the printing press.

Hundreds of years before researchers attempted to make the machine “think”, the printing press gave humanity a powerful and transformative gift: a sharing mechanism. Before that, formalized knowledge was only available on papyrus or parchment (a medium made of skins of sheep, goats, or calves that were prepared in such a way that they would become thin enough for writing on them with a “feather pen”). Each page could take weeks of manual labor, making books so rare that they were often chained to library shelves to prevent being stolen.

Of course, information could also be memorized and passed on person to person. At the same time, think about how ineffective this was on a large scale. But everything changed in 1436 when a German goldsmith named Johaness Gutenberg designed a machine that was capable of producing pages with texts very quickly. In 1454, he put his creation to commercial use, with the Bible being the first book ever printed.

Gutenberg's invention revolutionized how humans disseminated information. Think about its impact on communication, arts, academia, industry… You name it. Every other revolution involving knowledge has directly benefited from Gutenberg’s work. To be clearer: if you know anything about AI today, it is originally thanks to how Gutenberg paved the way for knowledge to be stored and shared.

Not All Words Are Spoken the Same

When we speak, we have several resources at our disposal to deliver the message more efficiently. From speed to volume, tone, pitch… the same message can be received in different ways depending on how we use these resources.

If we shout all the time, we will be annoying and rude. If our volume is too low or we speak too slowly, people will get bored and lose interest. If we speak too fast, we might sound nervous, and people might suspect we are trying to avoid scrutiny.

There is not a single correct way to speak. It all depends on the purpose, the context, the motivation, and the audience. Knowing how to present your message is as important as the message itself.

Here is a great example: imagine someone talking using a single tone and speed. No variation whatsoever. What do we typically say in such cases? We say that person sounds like a robot. Interesting, right?

Not All Words Are Written the Same

The written communication also has a grammar of emphasis, which was not introduced by computers. Many hundreds of years ago, humans understood the need and value of emphasis in written text.

One great example is the book Sylva Sylvarum or A Natural History in Ten Centuries from Sir Francis Bacon. A book first published in 1627, shortly after his death. As any carefully written material, it makes use of typographic emphasis.

A “Crash Course” in Typographic Emphasis

It might have been a while since the last time most of us saw this, while younger folks might never have actually read about it. In any case, here is a “crash course” (not really) to remind ourselves about the very basics of typographic emphasis.

In typography, there are different options for making words stand out. One of them is font styles, where the regular font style is for text without any emphasis, that is, neutral. When we want to highlight titles, foreign terms, a quote, or even special words being introduced in a narrative, we use italics. In order to say “pay attention to this,” we use bold, just as someone would elevate the tone during a speech to call the audience's attention to some key aspect of the message.

There are also font effects (or text decorations) like underline (or underscore) and strikethrough. In our digital world, underline is almost always reserved for a hyperlink (so much so, Substack does not support it for non-clickable texts), but it was originally intended for indicating importance. Strikethrough is for redacting/correcting a text while leaving a trace. It can be useful for revisions or as a nice resource that indicates “I first wrote this, but then I changed my mind and wrote that… and I want you to know it.” These resources and much more create a grammar of emphasis. It gives color to a narrative and allows the reader to imagine the voice behind the text.

This will be enough for our purposes. Just like spoken communication, these typographic resources exist for a reason. They all serve a purpose. The fact that some people never use them does not change anything about how a proper text should be written.

If a person speaking with no variation in tone, speed, volume, etc, is considered robotic, boring, uninteresting, why is not the same said about a text with no variations in font styles and text decorations?

Your phone, your computer, and the social media you use might be “no man's land” when it comes to typographic emphasis, but that is not true for other contexts, such as scientific and legal texts, where typographic emphasis is not only abundantly used but also expected.

A Cult of Ignorance

In my view, Steve Jobs was a genius. I could listen to him talking for hours. While current tech CEOs are becoming increasingly unlistenable, with their discourse full of noise and zero substance, I keep finding these old interviews of Steve Jobs, and am always amazed by how much gold about innovation he could deliver every single time. And yet, some people are still caught up in the fact that he was a “difficult person” to work with. Are you sure the great Greek Philosophers were not? How about Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein? It is easier to judge more recent names in our history without having enough information about the daily lives of more ancient names.

Quite in the opposite direction, the more I look back at great names in the process of advancing science and technology, the angrier and zero-tolerance I see them. Not exactly in absolute but certainly against the critical issues of their times.

Isaac Asimov, “The Great Explainer”, author and biochemist known for his ability to make complex scientific subjects accessible to the general public, wrote a piece named A Cult of Ignorance. In this piece, he says:

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

Bertrand Russell, a philosopher, logician, and mathematician, made significant contributions to the advancement of mathematical and analytic philosophy. His take on intelligence vs stupidity was also brutal:

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

Carl Sagan, an American astronomer, planetary scientist, and renowned science communicator, served as a NASA advisor in the 1950s and participated strategically in the U.S. space program. Sagan believed that the more we stay “in the dark”, the more we desensitize ourselves to the truth:

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.

And although Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and science communicator, has warned us about the ineffectiveness of denying science (knowledge), when he says:

The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it,

Charles Darwin, naturalist, geologist, and biologist, left us this staggering remark about human nature:

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.

Why are these individuals so upset? They have all been confronted with ignorance. They know it makes no sense, and they were trying to alert others about it.

It is a Matter of Taste

Steve Jobs did not invent typefaces, but he was the visionary who understood their importance and fought for that to be a core feature of the original Macintosh. He was obsessed with fonts and spent time learning calligraphy. He was dedicated to investigating what made “great typography great.”

During an interview in 1995 (which was only released in 2012), Jobs brutally stated that Microsoft had no taste since they did not bring much culture into their products. He then goes on to say:

Why is this important? Proportionally spaced fonts come from typesetting and beautiful books. That's how one gets the idea. And if was not for the Mac, they would never have that in their products.

Fast forward to 2026, and here we are, once again, witnessing the lack of taste taking over.

The Mother of the New Generation

The phenomenon is alarming. Recent studies show that Gen Z is ditching capital letters to favor “digitally native communication.” Some of them say they don't even understand why capital letters exist (!!). But it is not just capital letters. Younger generations are ditching grammar altogether. Here are some “interesting” statistics from these studies:

• Less than 25% of Gen Z use periods, commas, or quotation marks in digital communication.

• Only 16% of Gen Z and 28% of Millennials always use periods at the end of their sentences.

• Just 25% of 18- to 24-year-olds use correct capitalization, compared to 61% of seniors.

• Only 50% of Gen Z and Millennials bother to differentiate between “their,” “there,” and “they’re”.

For most of these people, the first time they saw linguistic constructions, a wide variety of adjectives and adverbs, and the use of font styles and text decorations was in the output of an LLM. So, just like in the Netflix movie I Am Mother, in which AI raises a child, and it is responsible for teaching everything about the world, LLMs are now “the mother” of entire new generations. Obviously not in a literal sense, but in terms of serving to them as “the source”. When they see structure in written text, they don't think of Gutenberg's machine. They think “their mother” created these texts.

What Happens Next

I believe in education as the obvious and very effective antidote to ignorance. But ignorance combined with arrogance might not be fixable. We have records of virtually all of the great minds in human history voicing their frustration against ignorance wrapped in arrogance. And they could not fix it. It has been happening through the ages, it is happening now, and might not have a single, practical remedy.

“Wait,” you might ask, “are you going to end this article on such a low note? Not at all!

Just like I believe the AI fatigue will eventually obliterate the AI hype, I believe that we are living something philosophically similar to the Dark Ages. A growing number of studies are showing an overall decline in cognitive abilities in humans, even in the midst of so much technology. It is getting worse every day. Let's entertain this thought for a second. If this could be the case, then I suspect that following this new Dark Age, we would have a new Renaissance period, followed by a new Enlightenment era.

Don't you believe me? What if I told you it seems that, at least in some proportion, it has already started? Several years ago, in Brazil, a movement pushing for teaching philosophy to young students started to get traction. Philosophy as a civic education. Interestingly enough, we are now seeing more and more young people rejecting the well-known hedonistic stereotype of Brazilians (partying, carnival, and beach culture) and deep diving into intellectual pursuits.

Thankfully, this is happening all around the world. Intellectualism is slowly but surely becoming a new status symbol. More and more people understand intellectualism as an asset and cultural capital as a much-needed resource in this day and age.

For every abuse, there is the ruthless opposing force that can annihilate it mercilessly: fatigue. It never fails.

What happens today with plain texts all over the internet is, in my view, an abuse. At the very least, it is a profound lack of taste. The same goes for linguistic structures. But we, humans, have seen this before. And we know we just can't stay in the dark for too long. We get tired, we get bored, and we will find our way toward a new Renaissance and Enlightenment.