The bold and italic LinkedIn forgot.

You've probably noticed that almost every other content platform lets you bold a word — LinkedIn is the holdout. The decision is intentional: LinkedIn's feed prioritizes plain text because formatting in posts trends toward looking like marketing copy. The downside is that real writers want the same basic levers as a paragraph of prose. Strong words deserve to be strong; an aside deserves to look like an aside.

The workaround the entire LinkedIn community has settled on: Unicode's mathematical alphabet. There's a section of Unicode containing "bold capital A" as a distinct character — separate from the regular A — meant for typesetting maths. LinkedIn happily renders those characters because they're still just text. So a bold word inside a LinkedIn post is actually a substitution: every letter swapped for its bold-alphabet twin.

• Bold: the most useful. Bold one sentence — the thesis of the post — and nothing else. Resist the urge to bold three sentences out of five; the eye learns to ignore it.
• Italic: for asides, short quotes, and book titles. Italics signal a change in voice without raising the volume.
• Bold Italic:for the rare case where you're quoting a strong opinion verbatim. Use once per quarter, max.
• Monospace:looks like code. The right choice for usernames, hashtags you don't want LinkedIn to auto-link, prices ($4.99), and dates inside paragraphs. Note that monospace breaks hashtag links — see the FAQ below.

A heads-up that the LinkedIn growth crowd usually skips: most screen readers read these bold and italic characters one-letter-at-a-time, spelling out the word instead of speaking it. The reason is that the characters live in the "Math Alphanumeric" block, not the standard Latin block, and screen readers fall back to generic descriptions when a glyph isn't in a familiar script.

This is a real downside if your audience includes any visually impaired readers, and a smaller-than-you-think downside in most other cases. The rule we'd offer: never format something critical to comprehension. Bold a punchline, not the only word in the sentence that explains what you're selling.

The same Unicode trick works everywhere that accepts text input: X, Threads, Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram captions, YouTube descriptions, Notion, Discord, iMessage, Slack, and most email clients. A handy short-circuit when a platform won't give you formatting and you really need it.

One platform that does notwork: Twitter/X's headline previews when you paste a link. Those use Twitter Cards, which are server-rendered HTML, and don't respect inline Unicode styles.

• YouTube Title Checker — see exactly where your title gets cut off in the feed.
• TikTok Caption Generator — five distinct captions for any topic, free.