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185 points gregsadetsky | 9 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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missedthecue ◴[] No.44057775[source]
Why is the new style to avoid capitalization when writing? I see it everywhere now. I can only imagine the annoyance of fighting autocorrect just to format your content like this.
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alabastervlog ◴[] No.44057956[source]
Kids doing weird shit to stand out, like every generation.

It makes reading harder, and with modern tools it certainly isn't any easier to write—with both those things working against it I doubt it'll stick around.

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1. forgotoldacc ◴[] No.44058076[source]
it's not to stand out when every person types like this

the real reason is it's conversational. it's casual. it removes the gap between the reader and the writer

it's how people talk in a chat with their friends

in pretty much every language across the world, writing was always "formal" and lacked the voice of a couple of people having a chat. at some points, writing was even a separate language. east asian people did lots of their correspondence in classical chinese instead of using their own languages. the catholic church hated the idea of people reading the bible in anything but latin

then people chilled out and realized writing how we speak makes it more accessible to everyone. and that's not a bad thing, it's a good thing. novels started taking a more conversational style and some people looked down on that decades ago. now those novels are considered classics, and honestly, i'd attribute half of that to their writing seeming "formal" in retrospect because formal speech today is yesterday's casual speech. now people will revolt against modern writing and think it's below them. in 5 decades people will think this kind of writing is very formal

basically, it doesn't make it harder. it makes it easier. people write how they think and they don't worry about being perfect. and as another commenter said, autoformatting and autocorrecting tools just break shit more than they fix it these days. i can't even type "i have 5 pennies" without my phone correcting it to "I have 5 Pennie's" for some reason.

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2. alabastervlog ◴[] No.44058095[source]
> it's not to stand out when every person types like this

Yeah, OK, I should have written "for social signaling".

> basically, it doesn't make it harder.

Iassureyou,capitalizationisn'tbecauseit'spretty.Aspectsofwrittenlanguageareoftenthereforverygoodreasonsrelatedtomakingreadinglower-effort.

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3. forgotoldacc ◴[] No.44058117[source]
saying "the way i write is correct. the way they write is signaling (and that's implicitly wrong)" is not a stance any serious linguist will support.

it is an interesting point to take, to claim that lowercase makes reading difficult. 12 year olds have no problem communicating this way and it's very easily understood. same with 30 somethings such as myself. it's not really the responsibility of the youth to limit their expression for the comprehension older people who don't engage with things they consider below them

german has even more extreme capitalization and english tossed out those rules. Maybe We could return to Something Similar to the Rules that German uses and That could be helpful for easy Reading?

or maybe english speakers just decided those rules were annoying and dropped them and people never missed those rules decades later when we forgot they ever existed

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4. wiseowise ◴[] No.44058654[source]
> novels started taking a more conversational style

It’s one thing to have conversational style and another to (almost) completely disregard grammar.

> i can't even type "i have 5 pennies" without my phone correcting it to "I have 5 Pennie's" for some reason.

Let me guess: an iPhone? What a motherf**ing garbage the new iOS keyboard is. Hope whoever worked on it reads this and feels ashamed.

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5. wiseowise ◴[] No.44058662{3}[source]
>> “it’s not signaling!”

> continues to provide reasons why it is signaling

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6. Yeul ◴[] No.44060264[source]
It's standing out by doing what everyone else is doing ie being a teenager.
7. hooverd ◴[] No.44063364[source]
Yes, that is how people type in chat, but a blog post isn't chat. What's fine in one medium can be annoying in the other.
8. forgotoldacc ◴[] No.44070664{4}[source]
it's called communication, yes

if the mere act of people using language to communicate frustrates you, that is a personal problem

9. forgotoldacc ◴[] No.44070678[source]
Verily, it could thus be said that that grammar of thine is incorrect, could it not? Wherefore dost thou decide grammar shan't change?

today's right grammar is yesterday's wrong grammar. yesterday's right grammar is today's cringe tryhard writing. languages evolve

and tbh most people who demand strict compliance are always the ones who make grammatical mistakes and don't realize it

> What a motherf*ing garbage the new iOS keyboard is

is not grammatically correct. "a" breaks the sentence