| THE REAL CRIME OF ALL-CAPS
SINCE THE ADVENT OF THE INTERNET, MANY ESSAYS HAVE BEEN WRITTEN ABOUT GOOD MANNERS ON THE NET — "NETIQUETTE" — AND EVERY ONE OF THEM HAVE REASONED WITH YOU THAT TYPING IN ALL-CAPS RUBS PEOPLE THE WRONG WAY BECAUSE IT GIVES THEM THE IMPRESSION THAT YOU ARE YELLING YOUR MESSAGE.
While the metaphor of an e-mail screaming at you is oh-so funny and just perfect to liven up an otherwise boring guide to good e-manners, what does the field of design say about it? Why is it so annoying and difficult to read more than a headline in all-caps?
Well, it has to do with a little something called "word recognition." It's the way we all read. Learning to read begins with letter recognition — sounding out words — and then gradually works up to recognizing letter groupings: visually identifying a word by the unique shape that its lowercase characters create. Words in all-caps have a less distinct shape to them, uniformly rectangular. They're just not as easy to differentiate one from the next; hence a slow and tedious read.
Compare the
shapes in the
two paragraphs
after they've
been reduced
to rough forms. |
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Ultimately, readers even acquire the skill of recognizing whole groupings of words — "as much as" is a simple example — which makes the whole process even faster!
So, try using lots of exclamations (!) if you want to yell at length!!!! All-caps just makes your rant harder to read.
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