Netiquette, by Virginia Shea, page 61

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Netiquette, by Virginia Shea, page 61

What to do?

Forget about boldface, italics, tabs, and font changes. Never use any effect you couldn't get on an old-fashioned typewriter. In fact, you can't even use all of those. Underlining won't work, for example. Nor can you use the old "required backspace" trick to put a diacritical mark (a tilde or an accent mark, for example) over another character.
Most systems won't read the diacritical marks anyway, so just leave them out. If you feel an accent mark is absolutely necessary, type an apostrophe after the letter the accent would have gone over.
Use only ASCII characters. This includes all 26 letters of the alphabet (upper and lower case), the numerals 0 through 9, and most commonly used punctuation marks. For any publishing mavens out there, however, it excludes em dashes (" -- "), en dashes ("-"), and bullets.
Limit your line length to 80 characters, or better yet,

60 characters.

Otherwise, your lines may break in weird places and

your readers

will have to wade through notes that look like this.

Believe me,

it gets annoying after a very short while.

NEVER TYPE YOUR NOTES IN ALL CAPS, LIKE THIS. It's rude -- like shouting constantly. And, like constant shouting, it makes people stop listening. All caps may be used, IN MODERATION, for emphasis.

To indicate italics, you may

*surround the material to be italicized with asterisks.*

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