one more response

[Michael Quinion]

> I agree that most people know that some folks associate caps with
> anger on the part of the writer; still, what some nameless person
> posted in 1985 is not binding on people today (cf. the 18th century
> prescriptivist "rules" for SHALL & WILL), especially not in the
> simplistic way that MM indicated in his posting.

I don't understand your point. What could possibly be binding in a
sample message I picked out to illustrate a point? There is indeed
a widespread convention in online forums - which I've seen codified
in group FAQs - that one should not type in all caps. Here's an
example, which is at http://www.ukindex.co.uk/begin8.html: "Beware
of leaving the caps lock on when writing e-mail or USENET messages,
and only typing capital letters. It may make things easier for you,
but it instantly marks you as a beginner, and is generally refered
to as shouting. YOU CAN PROBABLY SEE WHY!"

> Finally, while one could probably make a case for saying that
> "by 1992, it was receiving widespread and regular condemnation,"
> I'm interested in what the situation is NOW, ten years later.

Since you raise the point, I checked the Google Groups search
engine for all messages containing both "caps" and "shouting" this
year. Google found "about 20,900". Even allowing for the inevitably
large number of false positives here, that's still a lot (and the
first few dozen I quickly looked through were all variations on
this, from a message of 30 August 2002 in rec.motorcycles.dirt:
"Dewd, you should not post in caps... PPL don't like to read
messages when it's all in caps, because caps mean that you are
shouting...").  [PPL = people]

> What evidence is there, by the way, that "All-caps messages are
> harder to read than a mixture of caps and lower-case" and that
> "they do seem ... aggressive"? Some of us have learned to read
> them as aggressive under certain circumstances, but that does not
> mean that they are inherently so.

I can't quote you the details of the research projects involved,
but having worked with exhibition designers for a couple of decades
I do know that there has been psychological work done which shows
caps are indeed harder for people to comprehend. I've found a
number of (principally) educational sites online that repeat this
advice.

There is no shortage of messages in online groups, as I have shown,
that indicate that people do perceive messages all in upper-case as
aggressive and shouty; you've accepted that point already in the
first part of your last message that I've quoted above.


--
Michael Quinion
Editor, World Wide Words
E-mail: <TheEditor at worldwidewords.org>
Web: <http://www.worldwidewords.org/>