Boldface that does no work
Mechanical bold is a slide habit that escaped into prose. The model highlights OKRs, KPIs, the Business Model Canvas, and the Balanced Scorecard in one sentence, as if the reader cannot be trusted to see the names. Pattern 15 in REhume removes that. I still have to decide whether any emphasis belongs.
The tell
If I squint and the paragraph looks like a zebra, too many words are bold. Emphasis that lands on every proper noun is not emphasis. It is a highlighter dragged down the page.
Before: It blends OKRs, KPIs, and tools such as the Business Model Canvas and Balanced Scorecard.
After: It blends OKRs, KPIs, and tools like the Business Model Canvas and Balanced Scorecard.
The second sentence trusts the reader. The first sentence is a chat product trying to look like a textbook.
When bold is a real tool
UI copy sometimes needs one heavy word on a button label discussion. A tutorial can bold the menu path File > Export once. A glossary can bold the term on first use. Those are choices with a job.
My rule: after autofix, I am allowed one bold phrase per section, and only if the layout would be worse without an anchor. I almost never take the allowance. Headings already rank information.
How I edit
I unbold the whole file, then read. If I reach for bold again, I ask whether a heading, a list, or a code span would be clearer. Code spans are for identifiers. Bold is for shouting. Most technical docs need identifiers, not shouting.
REhume’s deterministic pass strips markdown ** emphasis that looks mechanical. It will not know you meant to stress a single verb in a warning. Put that back by hand.
Pairing with lists
Bold plus colon at the start of a bullet is a different pattern: inline-header lists. Bold plus emoji is emoji bullets. They stack. A paste can trip three style rules in one list.
I fix style before judgment. There is no reason to spend neurons rewriting a paragraph whose only problem is that every other word is heavy.
Practice
Take a generated README. Remove all bold. If the document becomes harder to use, you needed structure (headings, tables, definition lists), not weight. Add that structure. If the document is unchanged, the bold was costume.
I do this on my own drafts too. I am not immune. Once you have a hotkey for bold, you start decorating arguments you have not finished.
See also the pattern encyclopedia and title case headings, which is the same instinct applied to capitalization instead of weight.