Capitalized sentences are easier to navigate, but I do concede that they're a bit annoying to manage on mobile. I'm mostly amused at the lengths young people go to find and attribute generational...
Capitalized sentences are easier to navigate, but I do concede that they're a bit annoying to manage on mobile. I'm mostly amused at the lengths young people go to find and attribute generational meaning to every little bit of their behavior. Everything must be an avenue for self expression, I guess. So you use lowercase to show that you're chill, cool, whatever. I was once a teenager too, I get it.
I don't see how. I have to go three levels deep into the keyboard settings to turn off auto-capitalization, which is on by default. This is precisely how I see it as well. I think the entire...
Capitalized sentences are easier to navigate, but I do concede that they're a bit annoying to manage on mobile.
I don't see how. I have to go three levels deep into the keyboard settings to turn off auto-capitalization, which is on by default.
I'm mostly amused at the lengths young people go to find and attribute generational meaning to every little bit of their behavior. Everything must be an avenue for self expression, I guess. So you use lowercase to show that you're chill, cool, whatever. I was once a teenager too, I get it.
This is precisely how I see it as well. I think the entire article is making something out of nothing. Yes, there are a few "dedicated anti-autocaps", but most people, as with all things, are just following the trend because most individuals are horrified by the idea of standing out from their crowd.
I was a teenager too, in fact I’m Gen-Z although on the older side, but I never did any of this. I never even used emojis. I just prefer writing things properly. But I generally don’t spend a lot...
I was a teenager too, in fact I’m Gen-Z although on the older side, but I never did any of this. I never even used emojis. I just prefer writing things properly.
But I generally don’t spend a lot of time online, so I don’t know internet slang and I don’t keep up with memes. And this was true back when I was in high school, so it’s a culture that’s never attracted me. Which I’m sure is true about a lot of people my age.
Sure. The point is that younger people tend to ascribe generational significance to more things as a way to create what they perceive to be an unique identity. This doesn't have to be about the...
Sure. The point is that younger people tend to ascribe generational significance to more things as a way to create what they perceive to be an unique identity. This doesn't have to be about the way you write -- the objects of the obsession vary, but the phenomenon is recurrent. Almost everyone go through that phase, one way or another.
This was the most interesting bit to me: I personally capitalize and punctuate things, the exception being when I’m at my computer rapid-fire chatting on Discord with old internet friends. Then...
This was the most interesting bit to me:
Media scholar danah michele boyd (who legally changed her name to all lowercase) also questions the egotism of how English capitalizes the "I" pronoun rather than "you," "we," or "they." As she notes on her website, this rule came from a centuries-old tradition of putting "I" as the first word in a sentence — then that capitalization just stuck after that stopped being the case.
I personally capitalize and punctuate things, the exception being when I’m at my computer rapid-fire chatting on Discord with old internet friends. Then the capitalization and punctuation go out the window. I do wince when I see people double spacing after a sentence, which is a holdover from typewriter days.
Oof. I can't stand it when people read way too much meaning into meaningless conventions. This is part of a trend of projecting meaning onto language in ways that are at best speculative, at worst...
Oof. I can't stand it when people read way too much meaning into meaningless conventions. This is part of a trend of projecting meaning onto language in ways that are at best speculative, at worst plain irresponsible. In German, all nouns are capitalized, but verbs and pronouns are not unless they begin a sentence. Does that mean that Germans think objects are more important than actions or people? Of course not. But it's the same kind of thinking as "capitalizing the first-person pronoun as a convention is egotistic".
Language is a set of conventions, most of which are in essence arbitrary: they don't have a deeper meaning, they just happen to exist in the form they do because they evolved in that way over centuries or millennia.
I feel like the bit I quoted mentions that it did come from something arbitrary: “I” was often the first word of the sentence, and that eventually carried over to every part of the sentence. I...
I feel like the bit I quoted mentions that it did come from something arbitrary: “I” was often the first word of the sentence, and that eventually carried over to every part of the sentence. I feel like that disproves that it’s out of any ego thing, even if that’s what boyd was originally trying to suss out.
The double space thing is simple: Many who started using computers before 1998 were trained explicitly to use it. Between monospaced fonts and shitty printers, it was kinda a necessity for keeping...
The double space thing is simple:
Many who started using computers before 1998 were trained explicitly to use it. Between monospaced fonts and shitty printers, it was kinda a necessity for keeping things legible.
Muscle memory is a hell of a drug, and QWERTY keyboards themselves only persist for similar reasons.
Does the tildes markdown or something autocorrect to one space after a period? Because I got a good chuckle out of the fact that you only have a single space after the period in your sentence.
Does the tildes markdown or something autocorrect to one space after a period? Because I got a good chuckle out of the fact that you only have a single space after the period in your sentence.
That's just HTML in general. Whitespace is ignored after the first character, otherwise code indentation would be considerably more difficult. Some platforms like Slack will insert a non-breaking...
That's just HTML in general. Whitespace is ignored after the first character, otherwise code indentation would be considerably more difficult.
Some platforms like Slack will insert a non-breaking space after a regular space to allow for double spacing, however.
Yes. Tildes uses a slightly modified GitHub Flavored Markdown, which ignores/strips almost all leading and trailing spaces in paragraphs when parsing input, except in certain specific...
Does the tildes markdown or something autocorrect to one space after a period?
Unlike standard GFM Tildes doesn't require two trailing spaces to initiate a hard line break though.
So you can do this,
without typing two spaces after the above period and comma.
I'd argue that the double space question is not so simple, and that the problem is Microsoft's refusal to fix bad design choices in Word, instead insisting that everyone else is wrong. Better...
I'd argue that the double space question is not so simple, and that the problem is Microsoft's refusal to fix bad design choices in Word, instead insisting that everyone else is wrong. Better systems handle space characters sensibly, instead of trying to influence style manuals: in LaTeX, HTML, Markdown/rST/etc exports, and other formats, the number of space characters does not affect the size of the typeset space. Whether double or single spacing is used, the result should still look right. For example, I have written all of this text with double spaces, but what you see does not have multiple space characters.
Generally, when typesetting English, one does want a larger space after the full stop at the end of a sentence, something which would have been handled by a typesetter when typesetting by hand, or in handwritten documents can happen rather naturally. This spacing can't be handled in a straightforward way, however, because the full stop character has other uses, even uses followed by a space (eg, in abbreviations), where it should not have a larger space after it, and would cause confusion while reading if it did. This means that the typesetter needs to have at least a basic understanding of the material and language it is typesetting. Systems like LaTeX, use lists of scenarios and mechanisms for noting exceptions to decide where sentences end and where a full stop doesn't actually denote the end of a sentence. Some, like Emacs, actually do rely on double spaces after sentences and single spaces after other uses as input from the writer: double spaces make input unambiguous, and in that respect is actually quite useful. The link above is, to my knowledge, simply wrong. Fonts do not handle the spacing, because the problem is more complicated than what a font can reliably handle: if they made spaces after full stops larger, then abbreviations would look like the ends of sentences. Instead, good typesetting systems determine where sentences end (and don't end), and adjust spacing accordingly.
Word, meanwhile, uses a hodgepodge of conflicting designs. I would speculate that the most important of these, from typewriters and monospaced fonts, is that it is designed to allow the use of space characters for alignment and large spaces. Thus, it can't handle double spaces the way better systems do: the author might actually be trying to add some physical amount of space, or might be trying to align text in some way. This design, of course, makes no sense, because it specifically works for monospace fonts: try taking indented source code and viewing it with a variable-width font. In variable-width fonts, the space character no longer has a set form or size¹, unlike most other characters, but Word insists on treating it as though it does for the purposes of alignment. The results are usually horrible and inconsistent, but I see them frequently in poorly-written documents.
Microsoft could, of course, handle this in some more complex way, determining when double spaces are being used at the end of sentences and handling them accordingly, while either excluding more-than-double spaces or, more prudently, marking space-characters-as-alignment as a problem. In fact, their checking system clearly already finds double spaces, and then, instead of handling them intelligently, marks them as a problem. Apparently, for Microsoft, pushing style guides to adapt to their flaws is easier than fixing the flaws. Yet at the same time, Word also finds sentence ends, and increases the spacing there. So double spaces remain as larger spaces, and look bad, in Word.
From my perspective, there are thus three instances to consider:
You are writing in a monospace font, or in something simple that does not handle end-of-sentence spacing. Double spaces are useful, because they are better than not having any extra space at all.
You are writing with something that handles spacing intelligently, in which case double spaces and single spaces will both look the same, and look right, though in some cases, double spaces will help the system determine this.
You are writing in something that both adds extra space with double spaces, and adds extra space at the end of sentences while ignoring that there are double spaces. Use single spaces, but realize that this is flawed behaviour.
¹ This problem, of multiple space characters being used to denote spaces of different sizes even in variable width fonts, is particularly annoying and inflexible. It doesn't allow, for example, for narrower spaces, which are also useful, for example, in units like 1 m.
That was kind of the crux of my post. Other than LaTex, that wasn't generally the case until the late 90's. And LaTex wasn't a WYSIWYG editor. So almost everyone older than 30 wasn't raised with...
I'd argue that the double space question is not so simple, and that the problem is Microsoft's refusal to fix bad design choices in Word, instead insisting that everyone else is wrong. Better systems handle space characters sensibly, instead of trying to influence style manuals: in LaTeX, HTML, Markdown/rST/etc exports, and other formats, the number of space characters does not affect the size of the typeset space.
That was kind of the crux of my post. Other than LaTex, that wasn't generally the case until the late 90's. And LaTex wasn't a WYSIWYG editor. So almost everyone older than 30 wasn't raised with these things built into the editor.
Remember that the 500 MHz barrier wasn't even crossed until 1999. SATA wasn't a thing. Having 64 MB of 133 MHz SDRAM was some hot stuff and DDR was still on the horizon. And all of this was blazing fast relative to every year or so before that.
The point of all this is that resources were so incredibly constrained that design decisions needed to be made. One of those decisions was to not waste resources doing in software what almost every user was doing anyway.
So yea, double space doesn't make sense anymore, but it'll be a herculean feat to get multiple generations to kick the habit. I'd love to see some stats from sites like tidles regarding the number of submissions with double spaces that could be stripped out. Bet you a nickle it's a direct correlation with age demographics.
Ah, I actually meant to disagree with that. While over 30¹, I started double spacing in English as an adult, and think double space does still make sense: there are some places where it is useful,...
So yea, double space doesn't make sense anymore, but it'll be a herculean feat to get multiple generations to kick the habit.
Ah, I actually meant to disagree with that. While over 30¹, I started double spacing in English as an adult, and think double space does still make sense: there are some places where it is useful, and there are some places where it is not harmful. Microsoft Word is an odd exception where it's harmful, and that should be seen as Word's fault. If everyone used double spaces to split sentences, typesetting could be more reliable: even with more available processing power, unless the software outright parses the grammar of the writing, mistakes in sentence divisions can be made, as it takes an understanding of the sentence to reliably understand the purpose of a particular full stop and what spacing it should have, particularly when writing informally. For example, trying to come up with a maximally problematic example (using a style that includes '.' in abbreviations helps make things worse):
As shown in X et al. Oxygen also has this property.
This property is seen with Nitrogen, as shown in X et al. Oxygen also has this property.
In this case, without double spaces or something else from the author to distinguish them, no reasonable software can be expected to understand that the first passage is one sentence, and the second one is two sentences.
Outside of this, there are numerous cases where writing is still done in monospace fonts (for example, in screenplays), or in places where intersentence spacing is not handled at all (this text box, most likely), and double spacing can be useful.
I realize, of course, that my view on this is rather idealistic and outspoken, and my perspective rather unusual. My primary frustration with the question is the vehemence with which some people (not here) seem to argue against double spaces, when they are only harmful with Word.
Or we could all just use French spacing in English, and not distinguish between interword and intersentence spacing at all.
I agree with your perspective, and that’s why I’ve never made an attempt to break myself of the habit. I find it interesting that mobile keyboards use double space to automatically enter a period,...
I agree with your perspective, and that’s why I’ve never made an attempt to break myself of the habit. I find it interesting that mobile keyboards use double space to automatically enter a period, further reinforcing the habit, so for me it’s easier to just continue, given that, and the fact that a good amount of my writing is in monospaced source code comments as well.
In latex, you can use ^ for a small space following a period.
without double spaces, no reasonable software can be expected to understand that the first passage is one sentence, and the second one is two sentences
In latex, you can use ^ for a small space following a period.
For what it's worth I only learned about the double space thing months ago, and I used typewriters in my youth. I wonder if that's more of a thing in North America.
For what it's worth I only learned about the double space thing months ago, and I used typewriters in my youth. I wonder if that's more of a thing in North America.
I think one practical element the article misses is the medium. In instant messaging and tweets, messages are usually a single sentence. And because the user interface gives bounds to the message,...
I think one practical element the article misses is the medium. In instant messaging and tweets, messages are usually a single sentence. And because the user interface gives bounds to the message, capitalization and punctuation are simply not needed. However, in long-form discussion (like here), the same people usually write "properly", as there is actual benefit in readability.
And yet effort must be taken to turn off autocaps. If there's no need to use it, not that I agree, then why would they put forth the effort to turn off autocaps in the first place? It'd be one...
In instant messaging and tweets, messages are usually a single sentence. And because the user interface gives bounds to the message, capitalization and punctuation are simply not needed.
And yet effort must be taken to turn off autocaps. If there's no need to use it, not that I agree, then why would they put forth the effort to turn off autocaps in the first place? It'd be one thing if they needed to do so manually, I'd get it if that was the case, but having to make a conscious decision to turn it off, to me, shows it's nothing more than to fit in with others in their perceived social circle.
Autocapitalization is a mobile-only thing. Instant messaging first started with IRC. Besides, the real reason myself and plenty of others turn off it off is that most autocapitalization sucks. It...
Autocapitalization is a mobile-only thing. Instant messaging first started with IRC.
Besides, the real reason myself and plenty of others turn off it off is that most autocapitalization sucks. It gets things wrong all the time. It's much easier to tap an extra key while writing than carefully go back to fix an improperly-capitalized word every other line.
To be clear, I was not trying to contradict the article. The reason it is done is definitely social. But the medium is a reason why it is possible/easier.
To be clear, I was not trying to contradict the article. The reason it is done is definitely social. But the medium is a reason why it is possible/easier.
I use all lower-case often in single sentence tweets and messages often when there's an element of sarcasm, or where I want to give the impression that it's a raw thought that's been dropped off...
I use all lower-case often in single sentence tweets and messages often when there's an element of sarcasm, or where I want to give the impression that it's a raw thought that's been dropped off the cuff. It's easy for me to write properly, but sometimes ostensibly asserting that I didn't bother to edit the text helps with the delivery. The twitter user dril has made an art form out of this.
I've lately been exposed to texting with a bunch of Zoomer people for one reason or another, and one thing they have in common is that they do very little to punctuate their texts, and nor do they...
I've lately been exposed to texting with a bunch of Zoomer people for one reason or another, and one thing they have in common is that they do very little to punctuate their texts, and nor do they capitalise their sentences (going so far as to actively turn off auto-capitalisation on their phones). I found the phenomenon interesting, and wanted to know more about it.
i decided to give it a try in my texting and writing online for a while. it feels really weird, but also kind of liberating. particularly on my keyboard i feel like my left pinkie is getting a well-earned rest!
They also write in really unfocused ways with long, meandering digressions and needless parenthetical phrases that they don’t even bother putting in parens. This even shows up with professional...
They also write in really unfocused ways with long, meandering digressions and needless parenthetical phrases that they don’t even bother putting in parens. This even shows up with professional writers on some fairly large publications (though generally not ones with great reputations). I don’t know to what extent it is a generational thing, this sort of bad writing existed with my generation as well as people older than me when I’ve had to proofread papers. But it wasn’t typical among people who get paid to write nor among people with arts or humanities degrees from highly selective colleges. It was honestly shocking for me to encounter liberal arts majors out of the Ivies writing like this.
Meh. I really think this article is leaning too far into something that's not there. Sure, everybody's style and usage of capitalization changes depending on the context. You might pay closer...
Meh. I really think this article is leaning too far into something that's not there.
Sure, everybody's style and usage of capitalization changes depending on the context. You might pay closer attention to your grammar in a formal context. You might talk in lowercase to one friend, and with capitals to another. You might switch to lowercase and replace periods with the return key when talking in an IRC or Discord channel, after realizing you're the only one using the Big Letters and small dots. This is not some phenomenon, it's done purely for cohesiveness and aesthetics.
Unlike handwriting, capitals require slightly more effort to use, and in the case of instant messaging, to no gain in grammatical clarity. Although there is some truth to lowercase sentences conveying a more casual, informal meaning, especially if you normally use capitalization, that's solely a result of capitals being less present in back and forth messaging. But that's it.
There is some truth to lowercase sentences conveying a more casual, informal meaning, especially if you normally use capitalization. But that's it. No fancy new world of new grammatical norms (related to capitalization and punctuation, at least), no inherent casual association with shorter letters, no secret clubs of "anti-capital-ists" plotting to overthrow the grammatical tyranny.
I just can't stand the idea of "lowercasers" being a thing.
I'd be identified as a lower-caser. It was never a conscious choice to do so, just a byproduct of lazy typing. I suppose that's where the casual association comes from.
I'd be identified as a lower-caser. It was never a conscious choice to do so, just a byproduct of lazy typing. I suppose that's where the casual association comes from.
Capitalized sentences are easier to navigate, but I do concede that they're a bit annoying to manage on mobile. I'm mostly amused at the lengths young people go to find and attribute generational meaning to every little bit of their behavior. Everything must be an avenue for self expression, I guess. So you use lowercase to show that you're chill, cool, whatever. I was once a teenager too, I get it.
I don't see how. I have to go three levels deep into the keyboard settings to turn off auto-capitalization, which is on by default.
This is precisely how I see it as well. I think the entire article is making something out of nothing. Yes, there are a few "dedicated anti-autocaps", but most people, as with all things, are just following the trend because most individuals are horrified by the idea of standing out from their crowd.
I mean that it's often annoying to make capitalization correct when actually typing, not that it is hard to change this setting.
I was a teenager too, in fact I’m Gen-Z although on the older side, but I never did any of this. I never even used emojis. I just prefer writing things properly.
But I generally don’t spend a lot of time online, so I don’t know internet slang and I don’t keep up with memes. And this was true back when I was in high school, so it’s a culture that’s never attracted me. Which I’m sure is true about a lot of people my age.
Sure. The point is that younger people tend to ascribe generational significance to more things as a way to create what they perceive to be an unique identity. This doesn't have to be about the way you write -- the objects of the obsession vary, but the phenomenon is recurrent. Almost everyone go through that phase, one way or another.
This was the most interesting bit to me:
I personally capitalize and punctuate things, the exception being when I’m at my computer rapid-fire chatting on Discord with old internet friends. Then the capitalization and punctuation go out the window. I do wince when I see people double spacing after a sentence, which is a holdover from typewriter days.
Oof. I can't stand it when people read way too much meaning into meaningless conventions. This is part of a trend of projecting meaning onto language in ways that are at best speculative, at worst plain irresponsible. In German, all nouns are capitalized, but verbs and pronouns are not unless they begin a sentence. Does that mean that Germans think objects are more important than actions or people? Of course not. But it's the same kind of thinking as "capitalizing the first-person pronoun as a convention is egotistic".
Language is a set of conventions, most of which are in essence arbitrary: they don't have a deeper meaning, they just happen to exist in the form they do because they evolved in that way over centuries or millennia.
I feel like the bit I quoted mentions that it did come from something arbitrary: “I” was often the first word of the sentence, and that eventually carried over to every part of the sentence. I feel like that disproves that it’s out of any ego thing, even if that’s what boyd was originally trying to suss out.
The double space thing is simple:
Many who started using computers before 1998 were trained explicitly to use it. Between monospaced fonts and shitty printers, it was kinda a necessity for keeping things legible.
Muscle memory is a hell of a drug, and QWERTY keyboards themselves only persist for similar reasons.
Asking me not to double space is like asking me not to breathe. I've gone so long doing it this way, there's too much momentum to stop now.
Does the tildes markdown or something autocorrect to one space after a period? Because I got a good chuckle out of the fact that you only have a single space after the period in your sentence.
That's just HTML in general. Whitespace is ignored after the first character, otherwise code indentation would be considerably more difficult.
Some platforms like Slack will insert a non-breaking space after a regular space to allow for double spacing, however.
Yes. Tildes uses a slightly modified GitHub Flavored Markdown, which ignores/strips almost all leading and trailing spaces in paragraphs when parsing input, except in certain specific circumstances. E.g.
Unlike standard GFM Tildes doesn't require two trailing spaces to initiate a hard line break though.
So you can do this,
without typing two spaces after the above period and comma.
I'd argue that the double space question is not so simple, and that the problem is Microsoft's refusal to fix bad design choices in Word, instead insisting that everyone else is wrong. Better systems handle space characters sensibly, instead of trying to influence style manuals: in LaTeX, HTML, Markdown/rST/etc exports, and other formats, the number of space characters does not affect the size of the typeset space. Whether double or single spacing is used, the result should still look right. For example, I have written all of this text with double spaces, but what you see does not have multiple space characters.
Generally, when typesetting English, one does want a larger space after the full stop at the end of a sentence, something which would have been handled by a typesetter when typesetting by hand, or in handwritten documents can happen rather naturally. This spacing can't be handled in a straightforward way, however, because the full stop character has other uses, even uses followed by a space (eg, in abbreviations), where it should not have a larger space after it, and would cause confusion while reading if it did. This means that the typesetter needs to have at least a basic understanding of the material and language it is typesetting. Systems like LaTeX, use lists of scenarios and mechanisms for noting exceptions to decide where sentences end and where a full stop doesn't actually denote the end of a sentence. Some, like Emacs, actually do rely on double spaces after sentences and single spaces after other uses as input from the writer: double spaces make input unambiguous, and in that respect is actually quite useful. The link above is, to my knowledge, simply wrong. Fonts do not handle the spacing, because the problem is more complicated than what a font can reliably handle: if they made spaces after full stops larger, then abbreviations would look like the ends of sentences. Instead, good typesetting systems determine where sentences end (and don't end), and adjust spacing accordingly.
Word, meanwhile, uses a hodgepodge of conflicting designs. I would speculate that the most important of these, from typewriters and monospaced fonts, is that it is designed to allow the use of space characters for alignment and large spaces. Thus, it can't handle double spaces the way better systems do: the author might actually be trying to add some physical amount of space, or might be trying to align text in some way. This design, of course, makes no sense, because it specifically works for monospace fonts: try taking indented source code and viewing it with a variable-width font. In variable-width fonts, the space character no longer has a set form or size¹, unlike most other characters, but Word insists on treating it as though it does for the purposes of alignment. The results are usually horrible and inconsistent, but I see them frequently in poorly-written documents.
Microsoft could, of course, handle this in some more complex way, determining when double spaces are being used at the end of sentences and handling them accordingly, while either excluding more-than-double spaces or, more prudently, marking space-characters-as-alignment as a problem. In fact, their checking system clearly already finds double spaces, and then, instead of handling them intelligently, marks them as a problem. Apparently, for Microsoft, pushing style guides to adapt to their flaws is easier than fixing the flaws. Yet at the same time, Word also finds sentence ends, and increases the spacing there. So double spaces remain as larger spaces, and look bad, in Word.
From my perspective, there are thus three instances to consider:
¹ This problem, of multiple space characters being used to denote spaces of different sizes even in variable width fonts, is particularly annoying and inflexible. It doesn't allow, for example, for narrower spaces, which are also useful, for example, in units like 1 m.
That was kind of the crux of my post. Other than LaTex, that wasn't generally the case until the late 90's. And LaTex wasn't a WYSIWYG editor. So almost everyone older than 30 wasn't raised with these things built into the editor.
Remember that the 500 MHz barrier wasn't even crossed until 1999. SATA wasn't a thing. Having 64 MB of 133 MHz SDRAM was some hot stuff and DDR was still on the horizon. And all of this was blazing fast relative to every year or so before that.
The point of all this is that resources were so incredibly constrained that design decisions needed to be made. One of those decisions was to not waste resources doing in software what almost every user was doing anyway.
So yea, double space doesn't make sense anymore, but it'll be a herculean feat to get multiple generations to kick the habit. I'd love to see some stats from sites like tidles regarding the number of submissions with double spaces that could be stripped out. Bet you a nickle it's a direct correlation with age demographics.
Ah, I actually meant to disagree with that. While over 30¹, I started double spacing in English as an adult, and think double space does still make sense: there are some places where it is useful, and there are some places where it is not harmful. Microsoft Word is an odd exception where it's harmful, and that should be seen as Word's fault. If everyone used double spaces to split sentences, typesetting could be more reliable: even with more available processing power, unless the software outright parses the grammar of the writing, mistakes in sentence divisions can be made, as it takes an understanding of the sentence to reliably understand the purpose of a particular full stop and what spacing it should have, particularly when writing informally. For example, trying to come up with a maximally problematic example (using a style that includes '.' in abbreviations helps make things worse):
In this case, without double spaces or something else from the author to distinguish them, no reasonable software can be expected to understand that the first passage is one sentence, and the second one is two sentences.
Outside of this, there are numerous cases where writing is still done in monospace fonts (for example, in screenplays), or in places where intersentence spacing is not handled at all (this text box, most likely), and double spacing can be useful.
I realize, of course, that my view on this is rather idealistic and outspoken, and my perspective rather unusual. My primary frustration with the question is the vehemence with which some people (not here) seem to argue against double spaces, when they are only harmful with Word.
Or we could all just use French spacing in English, and not distinguish between interword and intersentence spacing at all.
I agree with your perspective, and that’s why I’ve never made an attempt to break myself of the habit. I find it interesting that mobile keyboards use double space to automatically enter a period, further reinforcing the habit, so for me it’s easier to just continue, given that, and the fact that a good amount of my writing is in monospaced source code comments as well.
In latex, you can use
^for a small space following a period.For what it's worth I only learned about the double space thing months ago, and I used typewriters in my youth. I wonder if that's more of a thing in North America.
I think one practical element the article misses is the medium. In instant messaging and tweets, messages are usually a single sentence. And because the user interface gives bounds to the message, capitalization and punctuation are simply not needed. However, in long-form discussion (like here), the same people usually write "properly", as there is actual benefit in readability.
And yet effort must be taken to turn off autocaps. If there's no need to use it, not that I agree, then why would they put forth the effort to turn off autocaps in the first place? It'd be one thing if they needed to do so manually, I'd get it if that was the case, but having to make a conscious decision to turn it off, to me, shows it's nothing more than to fit in with others in their perceived social circle.
Autocapitalization is a mobile-only thing. Instant messaging first started with IRC.
Besides, the real reason myself and plenty of others turn off it off is that most autocapitalization sucks. It gets things wrong all the time. It's much easier to tap an extra key while writing than carefully go back to fix an improperly-capitalized word every other line.
To be clear, I was not trying to contradict the article. The reason it is done is definitely social. But the medium is a reason why it is possible/easier.
I use all lower-case often in single sentence tweets and messages often when there's an element of sarcasm, or where I want to give the impression that it's a raw thought that's been dropped off the cuff. It's easy for me to write properly, but sometimes ostensibly asserting that I didn't bother to edit the text helps with the delivery. The twitter user dril has made an art form out of this.
I've lately been exposed to texting with a bunch of Zoomer people for one reason or another, and one thing they have in common is that they do very little to punctuate their texts, and nor do they capitalise their sentences (going so far as to actively turn off auto-capitalisation on their phones). I found the phenomenon interesting, and wanted to know more about it.
i decided to give it a try in my texting and writing online for a while. it feels really weird, but also kind of liberating. particularly on my keyboard i feel like my left pinkie is getting a well-earned rest!
If you end up undoing more than half of the auto-caps, it's more of an anti-feature than a feature.
They also write in really unfocused ways with long, meandering digressions and needless parenthetical phrases that they don’t even bother putting in parens. This even shows up with professional writers on some fairly large publications (though generally not ones with great reputations). I don’t know to what extent it is a generational thing, this sort of bad writing existed with my generation as well as people older than me when I’ve had to proofread papers. But it wasn’t typical among people who get paid to write nor among people with arts or humanities degrees from highly selective colleges. It was honestly shocking for me to encounter liberal arts majors out of the Ivies writing like this.
I'll always recommend Because Internet as a really in-depth look at digital communication, from many different angles.
it's a great read, i've been lending it to everyone i can!
Meh. I really think this article is leaning too far into something that's not there.
Sure, everybody's style and usage of capitalization changes depending on the context. You might pay closer attention to your grammar in a formal context. You might talk in lowercase to one friend, and with capitals to another. You might switch to lowercase and replace periods with the return key when talking in an IRC or Discord channel, after realizing you're the only one using the Big Letters and small dots. This is not some phenomenon, it's done purely for cohesiveness and aesthetics.
There are people who religiously avoid the use of capitals. There are also people who like capitalizing every word in their sentences. There are also the Germans. Those are the exceptions, not the norm that the article's trying to convince you secretly exists.
Unlike handwriting, capitals require slightly more effort to use, and in the case of instant messaging, to no gain in grammatical clarity. Although there is some truth to lowercase sentences conveying a more casual, informal meaning, especially if you normally use capitalization, that's solely a result of capitals being less present in back and forth messaging. But that's it.
There is some truth to lowercase sentences conveying a more casual, informal meaning, especially if you normally use capitalization. But that's it. No fancy new world of new grammatical norms (related to capitalization and punctuation, at least), no inherent casual association with shorter letters, no secret clubs of "anti-capital-ists" plotting to overthrow the grammatical tyranny.
I just can't stand the idea of "lowercasers" being a thing.
I'd be identified as a lower-caser. It was never a conscious choice to do so, just a byproduct of lazy typing. I suppose that's where the casual association comes from.
you've convinced to give up on autocaps. haha
I feel so free.