As far as #2 goes, well, presumably the author would disagree…? (Click on the Practical Typography link I posted for an—admittedly exaggerated, but not by much, I assure you!—example of what “overuse of emphasis” really looks like. It’s pretty bad! Much, much worse than anything in the OP, which—aside from the combination of bold and italic, which indeed is going too far—mostly only skirts the edges of excess, in this regard.)
Anyway, my point was primarily about the “sleazy online sale websites” / “crackpot writing” association, which I think is just mostly not true. Sites / writing like that is more likely to overuse all-caps, in my experience, or to look like something close to Butterick’s example paragraph. (That’s not to say the OP couldn’t cut back on the emphasis somewhat—I do agree with that—but that’s another matter.)
I agree the highlighted sentence in my article definitely breaks most rules about emphasis fonts (though not underlining!). My excuse is: that one sentence contains the core kernel of my point. The other emphasis marks (when not used for before-main-content notes) are to guide reading the sentences out-loud-in-your-head, and only use italics.
My recommendation is to use bold only in that case. Bold + italic is generally only needed when you need nested emphasis, e.g. bold within an italicized section, or vice-versa.
Yep, that definitely violates #1, no argument.
As far as #2 goes, well, presumably the author would disagree…? (Click on the Practical Typography link I posted for an—admittedly exaggerated, but not by much, I assure you!—example of what “overuse of emphasis” really looks like. It’s pretty bad! Much, much worse than anything in the OP, which—aside from the combination of bold and italic, which indeed is going too far—mostly only skirts the edges of excess, in this regard.)
Anyway, my point was primarily about the “sleazy online sale websites” / “crackpot writing” association, which I think is just mostly not true. Sites / writing like that is more likely to overuse all-caps, in my experience, or to look like something close to Butterick’s example paragraph. (That’s not to say the OP couldn’t cut back on the emphasis somewhat—I do agree with that—but that’s another matter.)
I agree the highlighted sentence in my article definitely breaks most rules about emphasis fonts (though not underlining!). My excuse is: that one sentence contains the core kernel of my point. The other emphasis marks (when not used for before-main-content notes) are to guide reading the sentences out-loud-in-your-head, and only use italics.
My recommendation is to use bold only in that case. Bold + italic is generally only needed when you need nested emphasis, e.g. bold within an italicized section, or vice-versa.