Adding emphasis with blockquotes

Question

In this answer I used the blockquote markdown syntax to emphasize the few sentences that contain the gist of the answer. Federico Poloni commented that this is bad practice and his comment got some upvotes. On the other hand, I've seen others using the same practice, see, e.g. this answer, this question or this question So I like to ask:

Is is bad practice to use the blockquote syntax to highlight a tl;dr?

(Oops, I did it again…)

A bit related:

Would the use of blockquotes confuse some machines that read the site? (And would this be good or bad?)

(He did it again!)

Answer 1

TL;DR

Yes, it is bad practice. Use either boldface or headlines to highlight TL;DRs. Use blockquotes only for text that could have otherwise been set in quotation marks.

Regarding the examples

• The blockquotes in your answer are irritating. From my first glance at the answer, I expected something like: A brief introduction; a quote from the question; some elaboration; a suggestion on how to phrase something. Thus when I actually read the answer, I lost some time to being flummoxed.

  Even, if we ignore the fact that the formatting of blockquotes is intended and designed for quotes, your answer is badly formatted. About half the text is emphasised and it would be much easier to read, if you integrated the blockquotes in the respective sentences, e.g., like this:

  My interpretation of the situation is that this is not an academic issue since you are approaching somebody who leads some business with some business-related issue.

  The fact that that somebody is also a professor and that somebody who you know has a class with this professor seems unrelated. So my advice would be to handle this as if it were a business meeting and not an academic meeting.

• In this answer by Aeismail, the blockquotes are not needed, but as the text is actually a quote of some sort and could be legitimally enclosed in quotation marks, it does not cause any kind of dissonance while reading.

• In this question by Electrique, the blockquotes have no reason to exist at all. The list is already visually detached from the rest of the text anyway.

• In this question by ff524, the blockquotes are not needed either. The question is already emphasised through the boldface. In my opinion, the best way to format this question would be using headlines, such as Background; Actual Question; Related questions. This way the main question is highlighted as intended and there is no extensive use of boldface.

In general

We are trained to read quotes as quotes and their design is tailored towards this purpose. Therefore abusing them decreases readability and should be done as rarely as possible.

Alternatives are:

• If you want to emphasise a sentence or a shorter amount of text: boldface.

• If you want to emphasise a longer amount of text: Use a headline that communicates the importance of this part.

• If you want to communicate that a portion of the text happens is different (but not more important), e.g., meta information or a digression, use italics.

  Before somebody comes along and complains that you may want to use italics for other purpose: Upright is the italics of italics. LaTeX’s \emph works exactly like this.

• Not emphasising at all. Often it is just not necessary.

Answer 2

Is is bad practice to use the blockquote syntax to highlight a tl;dr?

Yes, because now we have a double block quote, but only the outer one is a real quote: sometimes, yes, you might need to reproduce the original formatting too.

Since questions can be edited in time, and there other ways of highlighting a part of the text (e.g. italics or bold), I think it's useful to have a clear marker of what's a real quote and what's not.

Note: I have to admit, though, that I'm kind of obsessive for this sort of things (as my PhD students kindly like to remind me).

Answer 3

In the absence of block quotes, I am pretty sure your two uses in this question and the examples you link to should be offset with quotation marks (although my grammar is atrocious). The example where people complained, however, should not be offset with quotation marks. As bad as my grammar is, my understanding of typographical style is worse, but I think anything in quotation marks can be typeset as a block quote.

I do not think we should limit the use of block quotes to quotes taken directly from the text of the question (or even answers or other sources), but we should reserve them for quotes. I think bold and/or italic can be used to provide emphasis.

Answer 4

In my opinion, the biggest issue here is that misusing blockquotes as a form of emphasis happens because:

1. they look too emphatic. The yellow background is too flashy. The black-on-grey used here on Meta seems a better alternative, or also the schemes commonly used on e-mail (intented text with a thin colored vertical bar on their right).
2. there is no alternative syntax in Markdown for the same purpose.

To fix #1. I have submitted a feature request for changing the color scheme for blockquotes.

I would appreciate a fix for #2, too, but it would require adding Markdown syntax, which of course cannot be a decision specific to academia.se, and shouldn't be taken lightly (I am definitely against a further Balkanization of Markdown). A possibility, anyway, could be using exclamation marks:

This is normal text

! This is a paragraph with emphasis

This is normal text again.

Answer 5

I'll answer my own question with my view:

In view of the very few possibilities that markdown offers to format answer and basically no customizability of the markup, one can barely speak of a markup language (there even is not syntax for emphasis, only commands for typesetting such as italics, bold, and bold italic). Moreover, logical markup is not used to parse answers by algorithms (other than rendering). Hence, my view is that markdown shall be used to format the posts to appear as needed.

Finally, other SE sites seem to use blockquotes for other purposes than quotes: A comment to StrongBad's question over at english.stackexchange states that

…the main use of block quotes here is to format and separate examples of word usage.

Over as tex.stackexchange I also noticed the pattern that people used blockquotes to emphasize paragraphs.