Change syntax to $('.example p').emphasis({option: 'value'});

Among other things, this allows people to pass custom values to Emphasis from their own scripts, thereby making Emphasis much more extendible. 

I've written a Drupal module that implements the Emphasis library. The 7.x-1.0 version uses the mainline Emphasis library, and a 7.x-1.x-dev branch currently implements my forked version–providing many more options for customization.