i have banished all capitalization from my writing. the idea came to me in april 2000 when watching my son learn to write small and capital letters. after reading an editorial by andrew cantor on capitalization of software company names in the june 2000 edition of the magazine technology decisions, i sent in a letter to the editor that i have included below.
appeared in the august 2000 edition of technology decisions published by the national underwriting company (http://www.technologydecisions.com).
i enjoyed your article on capitalization of some words (e.g., Internet) and not others (the flip side: capital crimes, june td). after watching my son in kindergarten try to learn both lower and upper case letters and reading the six pages of arcane capitalization rules in webster's collegiate dictionary, i decided to ban capitalization entirely from my writing. i have been doing this for four months now and have yet to run into an instance where the meaning of the sentence is not clear without the capitalization. it is a new millennium. maybe it is time for some fresh thought on how we write.
bob senkmass mutualhartford, ct
ps. now on year four. i have run into some resistance in corporate circles (the argument being it is hard for a person to scan a sentence without capitalization). i do not buy it but i can revert to old style writing when forced.
pps. this would have helped in the non-profit category idea on getting more blood donations. seems like those gnarly capitals do not behave quite the same as their lower case peers...
I agree
No opinion
I disagree
Add your comment
Interesting. Very ee cummings.
What about those great emails you get THAT ARE WRITTEN WITH ALL CAPITALS? HOW WOULD YOU "SHOUT" AT SOMEONE THROUGH EMAIL?
The military/Government would also have a problem. Acronyms wouldn't be the same.
On the brightside, we could almost do away with the shift key.
Why not use Chinese characters? They don't have capital letters at all. (yeah, joking)
I've adopted a slight variation on this for my own writing, when I am writing script by hand. I've eliminated the dot in the letters "i" and "j" and the cross in the letter "t." I've kept the slash in the "x," however. I have found that I can write much faster this way, because I am always moving forward and don't have to keep going back into words to add the dots and crosses. Of course my writing is only readable to me, and I have to be careful when writing for others.
This is a dumb idea. The rules of capitalization are simplistic enough on the surface that anyone can get by with beginning-of-sentence and proper-noun capitalization. We don't live in some grammar police state where you are required to write things perfectly, but we have these rules in order to better communicate. If someone can't understand the rules, they become a screening process; people with the ability to read won't have to interact with you and everyone will be fine at the end of the day.
I see things on the complete opposite side. I learned to hand draft (i.e. floorplans, elevations) in college and there is a standard lettering system for labeling and noting the draftings. It is all capital letters and once you learn it, you can do it quite fast and somehow it forces each person's handwriting to look very similar so its all very readable to anyone (I guess thats the point). Capital letters never drop below their baseline, have no small accents (i.e. curve on "t", dot on "i") and space pretty evenly so everything looks neat.
I have a client that likes to do this. It makes her communications look lazy. I also have a friend who no longer puts any spaces at all after sentences in his emails making them quite difficult to read. I think we went to school to learn how to do certain things in the same way which makes our communications easier. I see no reason to change the rules and those who willfully defy them don't seem like pioneers or champions of anything... they just look stupid or arrogant.
I find the polemics funny. Communication is communication. If it's clear, then it works, if it's not, than adjustment is needed. to assume that someone's inability to memorzie and regurgitate arbitrary rules of syntax is a truly pointless form of academic hegemony that is far more arrogant than anyone who decides not to conform.
Of course people who do it now "look" lazy or stupid or whatever; they are transgressing the norm. The question is whether or not we'd all be better off changing it.
I think the caps at the beginning and end of a sentence can be useful, though, for scanning a document and being able to more clearly see the deliniations between ideas. Also, some words and ideas can have a different connotation that can ONLY be expressed with caps: such as "nature" and "Nature" or "truth" and "Truth" or "god" and "God" etc etc.
I Dont reAlly uNderStand all OF thiS. Is there A DIFFerence Between the Capital LettERS and THE LowerCase? If For EXAMPLe all the letters WEre THe same size SureLY one WOULd learn TO read Then as profienTly as you read my TeXt here?
I aM nOt sure AbouT endING capItilisaTIon.
ThinGs miGht be A Bit conFUsinG.
Why not GeT riD of WriTing AltogetHER.
Anf WhIlE We're AT iT - I Don't Liek spelin thinGs RitE or GrammaR EItheR?
,,,Is ? - : thAt Bettr*
Perhaps the use of two cases is a throw back to cursive writing in which lowercase letters flowed into one another and made for faster, smoother writing.
Capitalization rules are not difficult, and I think it does make scanning documents easier. Hey, why not dump punctuation while you’re at it?
Capitalization helped me tremendously when I started learning German. At least I knew which words were nouns.