I can't believe I lived my entire life without realizing the pleasure of using bold, italics, ALL CAPS, and exclamation points!

Like you, I was told by my teachers in high school (and, later, college) that fancy formatting was not allowed.  Twelve point Times New Roman, thank you very much, and nix the hyperbole.

Journalists, most novelists, and academics all agree: the only appropriate use of italics is in citing your sources.  You should be able to get your meaning across without visual tricks.  Exclamation points are off limits outside of dialogue.  Don't ask your readers question unless absolutely necessary.

Thank goodness for the internet.  Online writing embraces everything your high school English teacher denounced.

Short paragraphs?  Absolutely.

Generous use of bold? Helps with the SEO.

Exclamation points? Gets people excited.

Endless questions? No better way to make people feel like you know what they're going through.

So here are three tips for formatting written material online.  Throw open those prison doors!

Tip #1:
Never write a long paragraph

Reading text online is different from reading text in a book in several ways.  First, think about the shape of a book as compared to a monitor.  A book has a "portrait" orientation while a monitor has a "landscape" orientation.  That means that a line of text that would normally go on for, say, six inches in a book could go on for twelve inches or even more with a widescreen monitor.

We're not used to reading long lines of text.

Not only are we not used to it, but long lines of text make it easier for us to lose our place.  At least, in a book, you can use your finger to scan the lines.  The pages of a book aren't THAT big.  Web pages, on the other hand, can scroll down and down and down and down....  If there aren't pictures or subheadings to provide visual bookmarks, you can get lost in no time.

Short paragraphs are easy to read, and they can communicate a point more powerfully.  All that white space serves as a kind of visual emphasis.  Just look at the second paragraph of this section.  It stands out, doesn't it?

So avoid writing long paragraphs at your peril.  If you can't stop yourself writing massive chunks of text, just go through after you're done and insert paragraph breaks.  Trust me: the paragraph police won't fine you.

Tip #2:
Use formatting and subheadings to help your readers scan your document

One of the biggest differences between online readers and ordinary readers is how quickly their attention moves on to other things.

When you're reading a book, you really only have two choices: keep reading, or put it down.  Online, you can do whatever you want.  You can keep reading, click to a different article, check out what else is on the page, open up a new site, open up a new tab to check something out before coming back, and so on.

It is MUCH harder to keep an online reader's attention.

That's where formatting and subheadings come in.  They allow your reader to visually skim your document and take in the most important pieces of information.

Your reader intuitively understands that anything written in bold, italics, capital letters, a different color or a bigger font is more important.  Sentences written in bold jump out and exclaim, "Read me!"  If you want to convince a reader to invest their time in reading your document, when so many other delights exist online, you should make sure that your most compelling sentences stand out.  They'll serve as marketing as well as being part of the content.

If you're writing in plain text, however, you don't have the option of using bold or italics.  In that case, ALL CAPS is your friend.  Use it to "bold" words that you'd normally emphasize with formatting.  However, avoid capitalizing any more than one word at a time, or your readers will feel shouted at.

Tip #3:
Use a personable voice.

This isn't technically a formatting tip, but it will govern your use of exclamation points and questions.

When you're writing for an online audience, imagine that you're having a conversation.  Involve them as much as you can.  Invite them to imagine something, or ask them a question, or tell them a story.  Use formatting to convey the emphasis you'd naturally express through vocal tone and volume.  For example, you can convey the sense of your voice trailing off by using ellipses...

(Ellipses, by the way, are also a great way to break a long sentences into two parts...

...So you can continue the rest of the sentence on the next line.)

Online audiences respond best to the kind of chatty tone that you'd imagine from a talk show host.  They also (close your ears, English teachers) respond well to clichés.  I find it incredibly fun to pepper my writing with sayings and quotes, because they're exactly the kind of thing you'd hear from a friend if you asked her (or him) for advice.  We often use clichés and quotes in conversations as a sort of shorthand, to convey an experience or belief that's universal.

Go Ahead - Have Fun!

So stop worrying about following all those grammatical "rules" and start thinking about how your document APPEARS to your reader.  You want it to be (1) easy to read, and (2) compelling.  As long as you achieve both of those goals, anything goes.

Have fun!