> 9. Capitalizing the first letter in a sentence will reveal where you are
This one really surprises me, if someone contacted me without bothering to type a proper sentence I would just think they're an idiot. Everyone I know always starts a sentence with a capital letter, no matter the platform. They all know how to use the shift key.
This isn't even gate keeping, people use slang all the time, it is basic English. News, books, articles, tutorials, emails, teams, share point... Everything I read every day has proper capitalization.
I think you're being overly harsh on this when it comes to informal communication.
As others pointed out, capitalization is similar to white space, punctuation, and other tools that English has when it comes to informal communication.
Especially online, you can invoke a lot of imagery and thoughts and emotions by simply playing with the rules of English in a live-chat setting. Try to imagine in a chat the following sentence with different stylizations:
"The Customer is always right, so we need to work to correct this"
"thE CUsTomer iS aLWays RIght, So WE neEd To WoRK To cOrrECT thiS"
"the customer is always right, so we need to work to correct this :))))"
The first is quite formal and it's direct; perhaps it could be understood as sarcasm if someone knows you well, but it could also be taken at face value and quite seriously, or it could be taken as a throw-away statement.
The second indicates a mocking tone and maybe even resentment, taking the time to mimic a meme and also to purposefully make the sentence silly looking.
The third introduces the sarcastic smiley (I disagree with the article's interpretation, as I've always seen :))) to more represent desperation or exasperation)
With traditional rules of English, tone is difficult to convey with a single sentence and it's built with the surrounding text as a point of consideration to understand how to interpret a statement; with chat, this is far more difficult to communicate the emotion/intention as chats can be very fast and disconnected, and it's hard to follow the attitude and mood of a person to understand their intended messaging.
You could try to divorce the message from the emotions, which might lead to expediting some discussions, but it also leaves a lot of room for incorrect/wrong interpretations. Even if you divorce yourself from such concerns and try to be above it, your conversation partners might not approach it the same way.
The evolution of chat might be bastardizing the classic rules of English, but it's quite expressive and personally has made many conversations and relationships much easier with fewer misunderstandings.
I work with a lot of people from abroad, where English isn't their first language. I also have a lot of friends who are foreign too. Trying to read into the "tone" is pointless. Simple sentences, with punctuation and grammar goes a long way. A benefit of not having tone imbued as some intangible quality of how a sentence is written down makes it very easy to communicate with them. If they are pissed off, they just say it. If they are not liking a project at work, they just say it. If you want them to do something, you just say it.
These "gen-Z" rules are great if you are 15 and have nothing more to do with your time than worry if Emily fancies you or not by how many chins she gave her ascii text art smile. I was there: when I was a teenager on IRC and MSN messenger I was on hooks at the smallest detail; how long was it taking someone to reply, have they received the message, oh-no they're replying now I better not type out a message, they signed off "ilyvm" not "ily" they must have really liked me today...
This sounds quite dismissive, and it is in a way. "Old" people don't need to understand the difference between "k" and "k.". Gen-Z need to communicate to their audience and there's nothing more embarrassing than old people learning young people lingo.
> This is happening far outside the scope you're limiting it to, and it matters
Do you mean that you usually interact at work with people than cannot properly capitalize sentences, like we learned to do in primary school in practically any language that uses the Latin alphabet?
I capitalize English because capitalization in my language (and any other language I can write) follows the same exact rules.
It is a rule, it doesn't take much, capitalizing sentences at best proves that people know the basic grammar rules of the language and know when and how to use them, nothing more.
Not doing it proves that people either don't care or don't know the basic rules of the language, which says a lot more than doing it properly.
I think you hit the nail on the head - at a certain point caring about every single rule isn’t effective or is actually net less effective.
On HN I’ll use correct punctuation, grammar, and a wider set of vocabulary because there’s a good chance my message will come across more clearly.
For general emails, I’ll write with simpler language because it’s very much a get-in-get-out activity especially with more senior stakeholders.
For work comms, what’s the value in typing HN-style? Everyone already knows everyone else is smart. I believe communicating tone is more valuable than perfect punctuation and grammar, which make it much harder to get that across.
Or as my grandma used to say - you don’t treat people you want to be treated, you treat them the way they want to be treated.
> at a certain point caring about every single rule isn’t effective or is actually net less effective
My point is the exact opposite though: I've been writing like this for all of my life, for at least 40 years, to write like I don't care I need to actually think about it and put a lot more effort into it, because it feels unnatural, looks wrong and makes me immediately doubt of the quality of the content I produced.
Especially at work, where when I write something, it is for other people to read, sometimes many.
But I also capitalize my personal notes.
So, to me, your explanation of why you don't do it sounds like "look at me, I don't follow rules because we are all smart here, right guys? ... right?".
Don't want to be offensive, but correct grammar should be muscle memory by now.
Relying on muscle memory is good because it works on autopilot and let you focus on what's important.
That's fair, but your writing style mostly optimizes for you, your comfort, and your speed. And I say that as someone who started memorizing SAT words at the age of 8 - most people actually prefer to read a high school level (myself included in work contexts).
I didn't learn this lesson the hard way until I was past my mid-20s. When you write something for others, it's far better to optimize for them rather than for yourself. Let's say you spend twice as much time writing something in an 'odd' way, but it gets your 50% more reach or alignment or funding. That's probably actually a great use of your time.
> So, to me, your explanation of why you don't do it sounds like "look at me, I don't follow rules because we are all smart here, right guys? ... right?".
It's not about being contrarian, it's about the tradeoff. Tone is incredibly important in most situations.
When you write with perfect grammar and punctuation, most people don't know how to read into the nuance. Happy? Joyful? Pleased? Content? There's very little, if any, common understanding of the intensity or undertone in those adjectives. Imagine you're working with a new PM and he tells you the team's progress is 'acceptable.' What does that mean exactly? Is he happy with it? Is he mildly annoyed? Does he feel like things are off track and actually wants to talk more?
So how do we build this common understanding? It turns out most people have actually already built up a language with their friends! Through texts/DMs/etc. So when that language is ported over to a work context, most people immediately grasp it.
You can conform to the world or the world can conform to you. <-- A sentence where tone would be helpful.
> When you write with perfect grammar and punctuation, most people don't know how to read into the nuance
I still can't understand the argument here, it sounds so off that seems fabricated to me.
When you read the Divine Comedy (we study it in high school in Italy) the grammar is not in current modern Italian, the style is from 550 years ago, the poem is written in hendecasyllables in terza rima [1], the references are often obscure, but in no point of it the tone is hard to understand, because the author conveys it explicitly.
l’ora del tempo e la dolce stagione;
ma non sì che paura non mi desse
la vista che m’apparve d’un leone.
Questi parea che contra me venisse
con la test’alta e con rabbiosa fame,
sì che parea che l’aere ne tremesse.
Dante is saying that it was a beautiful day of spring, but not as beautiful to not be scared by the sight of a lion that went his direction, looking enraged by the hunger, making "the air tremble"
Writing is a non-verbal, not-in-person, form of communication, you can't look for what's not in it.
Assuming a neutral tone unless specified otherwise, it's always the best bet.
Also, as I've said before, improper grammar could also mean "I don't know the grammar of your language well enough", if I'm writing French, I make a lot of mistakes because I don't use it very often, so the tone is the last of my concerns and the people reading it could easily think it's from a 9 year old kid who hasn't finished primary school yet.
If you think that correct grammar is more than just "the proper way to use the language" you're most probably seeing too much into it.
> Imagine you're working with a new PM and he tells you the team's progress is 'acceptable.' What does that mean exactly?
it means "acceptable"
in a scale from 0 to 10 acceptable is >= 6 and < 7
> Assuming a neutral tone unless specified otherwise, it's always the best bet.
I actually believe most writing is non-neutral in nature. Every word choice and sentence structure conveys meaning, intentional or not.
For example, why did Dante describe the sight of a lion as making "the air tremble" rather than cause "a stillness in the air"? Or a slightly more powerful variant, "a silence in the air"? My guess is that he wanted to call attention to how dominating the lion's presence was, that even the air was humbled/scared. That's how intimidating and commandeering the lion was. (Very intentional word choice here by me to pair with enraged!)
Maybe that's the wrong interpretation, but we also have people who study exactly this! The nuance of literary works and their meanings.
The article mentions a difference between 'lol' and 'haha' - if you boil it down, is that really so different from 'the air tremble' vs. 'a stillness in the air'? It's word choice again, ultimately.
> Also, as I've said before, improper grammar could also mean "I don't know the grammar of your language well enough", if I'm writing French, I make a lot of mistakes because I don't use it very often, so the tone is the last of my concerns and the people reading it could easily think it's from a 9 year old kid who hasn't finished primary school yet.
Maybe this is why we disagree - I believe that once relative fluency is assumed, tone becomes more important.
Mandarin is a great example here. Most people who are just starting to learn Mandarin focus on vocabulary, pronouns, etc. But once you get to a more advanced stage, it reveals a really unique twist.
Informal 'modal particles' [1] are optional in sentences but also can significantly change the mood. You'd never use them in formal writing (they're not exactly professional), but in practice people use them in everyday written communications. Interestingly enough, they're by default pronounced in a neutral tone but can also be inflected with more emotion even though Mandarin is already a tonal language.
English doesn't have modal particles, and the closest equivalent I've seen are these Gen Z Netiquettes (which aren't only for Gen Z as a few people have pointed out).
---
As an example:
1. 吃饭: eat food
2. 吃饭吧: eat food, we should (friendly but also commanding)
3. 吃饭吗: eat food, want to? (friendly but more suggestive)
---
In English, you could write it like this instead:
1. food
2. we should get food
3. want to get food?
---
But that's not exactly right, because Mandarin also has formal sentences for those forms:
1. 吃饭: eat food
2. 应该吃饭: should eat food
3. 要不要吃饭: want to eat food or not?
---
So closer parallels in English instead could be:
1. food
2. food :eyes_emoji: [2]
3. food? :drooling_face_emoji: [3]
---
And as the article mentions, you can even merge 2 modal particles into a new one that's equal to the combined mood of both. For extra nuance!
e.g. 吃饭了吗: eat food, have you already done it? (friendly)
I think there's some truth to the idea that emojis are a bit of madness (but are also here to stay), but I disagree that nuance doesn't exist in written communication. It's existed for hundreds of years already, as mentioned above in the Dante example. Emojis are just a modern-day version of nuance.
In your original post, you mention:
> Not doing it [capitalization] proves that people either don't care or don't know the basic rules of the language, which says a lot more than doing it properly.
The third (more charitable) possibility is that people are intentionally doing it for nuance. For example, I capitalize in formal emails with customers but use lowercase with friends. My guess is that most people I work with do the same, and more importantly know others are also aware of this.
So at work, I can either choose to treat my coworkers as closer to customers or closer to friends. You can likely guess what that means. (<-- another example of a short sentence where tone is lost - was I amused? condescending? factual? <spoiler> it was the first </spoiler>)
Lastly, while you may personally disagree with the existence of nuance, it's hard to deny that a large chunk of people do infer nuance from text - just looking at this HN thread alone! So the takeaway I'd lightly (and not firmly!) suggest again is that it's worth optimizing for others in certain situations even if it seems like madness.
> I actually believe most writing is non-neutral in nature. Every word choice and sentence structure conveys meaning, intentional or not.
Neutral as "exactly what it says", not "without any inflection".
Tone in writing is conveyed through how sentences are formed, which forms you use, what kind of words you chose, how verbose/succint you are, etc.
Capitalization does not mean anything special, it's only a grammar rule used to separate sentences and make reading easier.
if someone thinks that not capitalizing sentences means being informal, why not write in plain incorrect English, or using some street slang, or communicate by sending memes, where is the limit?
English speakers make a lot of fuss around things that are common in many other languages.
Mandarin is one, Italian, my language, is another (we have modal particles too).
If you want to be formal there's a form called "dare del lei" ( address someone in the third person ), if you want (or can) be informal it is called "dare del tu" (address someone in the second person, the regular you)
> The third (more charitable) possibility is that people are intentionally doing it for nuance
> So at work, I can either choose to treat my coworkers as closer to customers or closer to friends
Which is a lot of effort for little gain, at the risk of sounding sloppy.
There are much better ways, like using "Hi Mark" instead of "Good morning Mr. Stuart"
> , it's hard to deny that a large chunk of people do infer nuance from text -
Agree, from text not from text structure.
Text can be formal, informal and every other degree in between.
Structure can only be right or wrong, style only good or not good.
norwegian nobel committee oslo on behalf of the bureau of liberal international the global federation of liberal political parties I have the honour to bring to your attention our support for the nomination organized by the drugs peace institute of senator leila de lima of the philippines embattled democratic leader and internationally recognised human rights defender for the prestigious nobel peace prize
this is a very formal text in a not very good style (wall of text / blob of words)
EDIT:
So closer parallels in English instead could be:
1. food
2. food :eyes_emoji: [2]
3. food? :drooling_face_emoji: [3]
---
My version.
Words are free, use them.
Emojis are not as universal as people think, do not translate linearly across cultures and are not as easy to type.
I wouldn't say "food" as a single word to mean "here's your food" not even to a dog.
I'm not sure what you are saying here, do people at your work write/communicate like Gen-Zers? Does Amber in HR get offended at your sharpness if you finish your sentence with a full stop?
> These aren't US specific Gen-Z rules, these are quite global.
These rules are specifically about English, and a younger generation. It's not as global as you think.
As someone who speak chinese. I can confirm this. If your boss or parent ever send message to you with your full name and properly closed sentence. You are running into something serious. It's not a English only rule.
This seems like a very effective way to dismiss people that don't share your background. Also, not speaking basic English does not make one an idiot, there are actually quite a few other languages in the world.
Exactly. I get the feeling that a lot of the grinding reactions to this article in the comments here are from people who never lived in the IRC days, or chatted with their friends on AIM, MSN messenger, etc. Not everything is an email, and young people have found ways to convey subtext in shared digital superset of English, nothing wrong with that.
Not everyone follows the "netiquette" though. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Most of these rules rang very true to me at least. For example, capitalizing letters in _informal_ chats does give off a formal tone. This doesn't mean no one does it, but it's definitely a thing.
Gen Z here and I had to check my IMs and it’s always capitalised at the start regardless of if it was done automatically. Although I regularly don’t end messages with a . Unless it’s a long message. I certainly wouldn’t think it’s rude.
The one thing that was completely true though was the smile thing “good job :)” is extremely toxic.
Most of this list is just things people tend to do but wouldn’t notice if you didn’t.
typing without capitalization can help to create a more informal, somewhat playful tone. same goes for slight misspellings or abbrs instead of spelling out the full word. its just another way to add a small amount of “tone”.
My impression of people who write like that is that they're 9 years old and somehow made it on the big-boy Internet. Mostly because the content of messages written in that fashion gives that impression as well. It's sloppier than the average youtube comment.
What a bizarre take. Who do you work with? The majority of people I’ve worked with of all ages at various companies default to all-lowercase in casual communication, including some of the most intelligent and expressive people. As the other commenter said, it’s perceived as friendlier and more casual. Messages with capitalisation and completely correct grammar in these settings comes off as stilted and corporate.
How old are the people you communicate with regularly? I work with plenty of late 20 and 30-something professionals and they all intrinsically understand this phenomenon. I also work in tech, with tech savvy individuals, so maybe that has something to do with it.
Naturally. But being lazy and not capitalizing first words "just because" is neither of these.
Especially when paired with phrases like "who dat". You're just coming across as doing the barely minimum effort to write. Like people that mumble because they can't be bothered with communicating to you.
Not capitalizing on mobile takes extra effort, it is the default.
I'd argue that on a keyboard, it is also showing intention and effort. Everyone is so used to proper capitalization, it comes automatically. I don't have to make an effort to press shift when I press 'I', it's entirely subconscious.
Capitalization is largely unrelated to effort or lazyness. Except for a few extreme cases whose lack of effort is just as visible in the rest of the prose, or the quality of the ideas.
Furthermore, I'd encourage one to spend more effort evaluating the substance of what someone has to say, rather than dismissing their intelligence on account of cultural or stylistic differences. Limiting yourself to a smaller bubble out of disdain seems like self-inflicted imprisonment.
capitalization conveys essentially no information in itself, so it would be a waste to continue mindlessly using it when it could be encoded with additional information. Part of what we are seeing with evolving norms is the fat being cut from written english. is our completely redundant capital chatacter set REALLY being used to its fullest extent right now?
An "idiot" does things without knowing or considering why. People choosing to break old capitalization rules to better communicate are a step above those who can't handle that the english they learned in grade school no longer exists.
There’s a beautiful irony in claiming people who don’t use capitalisation are idiots/lazy, followed up by complaining that you struggle to parse a sentence without capitalisation.
Your views say far more about your own intelligence/laziness than anyone else’s.
Why are you moving the goalposts? The comment is specifically referring to capitalisation, not all grammar, and punctuation wasn’t even mentioned.
I have absolutely zero difficulty parsing uncapitalised text. Most of my communication is and has been uncapitalised for the past 20 years. Including in professional context (Slack, git etc). If you’re struggling, it’s because you’re lazy, not because it’s difficult.
IRC is not a book. It's spoken language in written form, not written language. There's not always full sentences or paragraph structure. Seems like this distinction has escaped you.
You should probably spend more time on the internet, or be a bit more relaxed. Many people uncapitalize for stylistic effects, say to portray how you're uninterested or chill you are, which are very common young people signals for "I'm cool".
Other than that plenty of non idiots forget to capitalize a sentence.
I spend too much time on the internet. I would strongly argue that using the same style/level of English (punctuation, capitalization, grammar) that a seven year old knows is far more communicative and understandable than using incorrect punctuation and worrying if a full stop means someone is angry.
Perhaps people should just read the content of the message and stop worrying about the set-dressing. "They capitalized, they must be a nerd", "she ended that will a full stop, she must be mad!".
> Perhaps people should just read the content of the message and stop worrying about the set-dressing. "They capitalized, they must be a nerd", "she ended that will a full stop, she must be mad!".
Aren't you doing exactly that when you complain how people type their messages?
The “cool” stuff now on the Internet is to avoid the man-child stuff of trying to look cool by copying so-called habits of younger people.
I’d say that copying trend is mostly visible in the early- to middle-millennial cohort who are starting to realize that they’re not the center of the world anymore, a boomer-like reaction on a more reduced scale, if you wish.
My defense when I was younger was simply that I didn't even intend to type proper sentences for instant messaging -- I viewed it as a textual representation of speaking[1], not short-form prose.
(These days I aim for proper sentences also in instant messaging, acknowledging the asynchronous nature of it. But if I happen to catch my conversation partner active, I might switch to the more informal, "verbal" style.)
----
[1]: You may think you speak in proper sentences, but try to transcribe an audio recording literally some day. You might be surprised!
I would consider that lazy and unprofessional. If a new hire communicated to the C-levels like that they would probably be scolded, but no one is going to scold the CEO.
Wasn't the whole Blackberry shtick about having a full qwerty keyboard so the business folk could send messages that didn't look like T9 gibberish?
I recently noticed my habit of starting a message or note with a lower case letter. What I found amusing (and what led to me thinking about it) was that I always capitalise the start of the second and subsequent sentences. Also of note: I always capitalise the first person pronoun and often omit the ultimate punctuation
The other ones I kinda agree (with measure), but this one is awful. Then they ask why "is it so hard to get a job". Job market issues aside, don't come across as a dork.
> Job market issues aside, don't come across as a dork.
Not disagreeing with you, but I think what constitutes as being a dork depends heavily on the situation (workplace culture, etc.). Writing like a Gen Z doesn't necessarily make one a dork.
I'd argue that the reverse is true: not writing like everyone else (i.e. completely ignoring the so called "Gen Z Netiquette") makes you a dork for being inept at adapting to the new social norm.
> Writing like a Gen Z doesn't necessarily make one a dork.
If a Gen Z can't write basic sentences with basic grammar and punctuation then that shows poor English skills. In the work place setting, as the OP was talking about, this is really important. It also shows lack of awareness or respect or empathy because they can't communicate to their intended audience (colleagues/interviewer) using language appropriate for the setting (a professional work place).
I used to feel the same but I now had to teach two otherwise intelligent juniors that work communication is formal and sentences do start with a capital. So apparently it got lost at some point.
Both my Marroccan employees didn’t capitalize sentences, whereas they capitalized nouns, even in customer-facing apps. Does this concept exist in Arabic languages?
Arabic writing doesn't have capitalization. What language were they writing? It sounds like they noticed that proper nouns were capitalized but maybe felt the other rules about capitalization were too much bother. I even get confused sometimes about capitalizing in titles.
Based. Letter casing a mistake. We only have it because Charlemagne's scribes decided to use a different font for their Latin, and then it stuck, leaving us with double the character set, input handling bugs to fix, and shit to argue about.
Yeah, I think I should say that when a longer conversation is _ongoing_ then I think dropping capital letters and full stops is more natural as the conversation flows.
If I am trying to communicate something or it's the first message then it's always capitalized with the usual punctuation. Maybe even a semi-colon if I am feeling listy.
i've just taken the most basic of looks over my DMs in various platforms and i'd put it at 50% starting with caps, and some of those messages are off people i'd consider pretty clever
This one really surprises me, if someone contacted me without bothering to type a proper sentence I would just think they're an idiot. Everyone I know always starts a sentence with a capital letter, no matter the platform. They all know how to use the shift key.
This isn't even gate keeping, people use slang all the time, it is basic English. News, books, articles, tutorials, emails, teams, share point... Everything I read every day has proper capitalization.