To Capitalize, or Not to Capitalize
October 24th, 2008When I’m writing something for the web—whether it’s on Twitter, in an e-mail, or on my blog—I never capitalize. I might think about hitting the Shift key, but my pinkies always manage to ignore the impulse. Well, after a Shift-key-free ten years, I finally caught grief for my keyboarding ways.
“Honey, you need to capitalize your blog posts,” said my boyfriend, an avid proponent of proper grammar.
I was appalled. Capitalize my blog posts?? I have always associated proper capitalization with news articles, contracts, and professional correspondence—not always the friendliest of documents. Personal blogs should be casual, like an e-mail to a friend, a vehicle for self-expression. Lowercase type is also much more aesthetically pleasing: just compare the lowercase m’s gentle arches to the jagged points found in the uppercase M. Even my company, the gigantor consulting firm that it is, recognized this when they rebranded seven years ago.
There are far more deplorable typographical and grammatical sins… spelling errors and run-on sentences, for starters. Compared to these, exclusively using lowercase type is a minor offense, wouldn’t you say?
P.S. I used proper capitalization throughout this entire post just for you, Keith. But you’ll have to view the source code to see it.
I set the text-transform property in my stylesheet to lowercase.
October 24th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
Oh yeah, babe? I just used stylish to set the following global CSS rule to your domain:
“div.post > * { text-transform: none; }”