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I heartily agree with Molly on the great majority of the points in her post. I too, am a fan of taking huge spammy descs and splitting them into extra descs, and especially to bury vital clues en passant. On our mud we have some very good writers who started out very prosy, but now understand this concept.
On the subject of highlighting words: Even if tastefully done as Molly suggests, I generally don't like reading descriptions interspersed with highlighted text as a way for the builder to tell me there is an extra description in this room. If there is nothing in the builder's written description that makes me curious about the wall or the floor, then the effect of highlighting 'wall' and 'floor' only sends me the message that I must be stupid for not being so curious.
Finally, on using colour (everyone has an opinion): On those codebases which offer coloured text, there is usually an option to turn it off for those die-hards who insist on capturing the look-and-feel of the Telnet Experience. I personally prefer the varied colour schemes based on sectortype and time-of-day (like SMAUG's - after removing the illegible ones). When its midnight and I'm in the graveyard fighting skeletons, I don't want to see everything coloured in bright sunny yellow.
But the most important factor to me, when judging any area, even more important than all the numerous and well-intentioned rules of style and good taste is gameplay value. How do I feel when wandering about this area? Are there things here that make we want to explore further? What is the mood? Do I have a sense of anticipation? Danger? Safety? Or boredom? I'm sure most of us have spent substantial hours on muds which commited many of these style-gaffs, and although we are right when we want to see them eliminated, we nonetheless kept coming back to these muds because of these other, less-articulatable elements. For me, this is the make-or-break for an area and a game no matter how tasteful the colour scheme, how tidy the margins, or how correct the grammar.
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