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What are people's thoughts on CAPITALIZATION in headlines/titles for EMPHASIS?
One of my favorite YouTube channels, Linus Tech Tips, does this all the time, but I have seen many others doing this as well, and I personally find it rather obnoxious. I understand that it's more effective at getting them views, which they rely on to stay in business... but I see it as just another form of clickbait, and so when I submit LTT videos I tend to remove that capitalization.
However, are there any cases where capitalization for emphasis is appropriate in a headline/title? And if not, should titles be edited to remove them?
p.s. Acronyms and Initialisms are obviously different, so let's ignore those and put them in the "clearly acceptable" category.
it has legitimate uses, but the illegitimate uses of it really have poisoned the well such that i can't really take EMPHASIS in HEADLINES or video titles seriously outside of being done in jest at this point. it's also a crutch,
in general though, and i find that people are usually better off just letting the content speak for itself most of the time. if the information is actually quite important (and if you actually know what you're doing and how to convey that information) the title will speak for itself and you won't need to use capitalization or any other sort of emphasis in the first place.
Can you come up with an example of a legitimate use of it, besides in acronyms and initialisms? Because I am curious what it would be and honestly struggle to think of one myself.
really any situation which doesn't allow for other forms of emphasis, of which there are many. you can't use italics or bold text on most social media platforms for example other than through hacky unicode letters that don't display universally, which is what makes capitalization the dominant method of emphasis on such platforms (and is why it's dominant on youtube, i'm guessing).
So given the fact that Tildes does not allow italics and/or bold in titles, does that mean you think using CAPITALIZATION for EMPHASIS should be considered acceptable in titles here?
despite the fact that i don't personally take such methods seriously, i'm wholly agnostic to the idea. if people can justify their use of it in a way that seems valid, then let them use it, and if they can't then don't. i don't see any particular reason to universally condemn one style over the other beyond personal preferences.
Fair enough... But what would a valid justification look like? And if someone can't come up with a valid justification, what then? Should providing a justification be a requirement when using capitalization, or will each individual case need to be challenged before that needs to be provided?
That sounds like a lot of needless meta conversations to be having in every topic with capitalized words for emphasis. And ultimately, what is the benefit of even allowing it in the first place?
As you yourself said, "if the information is actually quite important (and if you actually know what you're doing and how to convey that information) the title will speak for itself and you won't need to use capitalization or any other sort of emphasis in the first place."
Style.
LTT does it because that is their brand. They've owned the clickbait nature of the platform and doubled down on it with a self-awareness—their awkward advertisement inserts are part of that charm they employ. Of course, there's not exactly much room for style when it comes to clickbait titles, but the caps are part of the style of the channel.
With Tildes, we don't have channels or personal brands. Just posts. So when posting a link or an article, the idea is that there's no room for style in the posting, only in the comments. But if someone is making a self-post, there's some room for style. Perhaps they do want to emphasize with capitalization, that's up to them. Of course, they should be conscious about how it may come across but that's part of the deal of style: how do you work with what you've got?
Yeah, I definitely think allowing text topics a bit more leeway makes sense.
p.s. I <3 LTT and totally get why they do it. Even they have admitted they don't particularly like doing it but it's an unfortunate necessity of running a business on YouTube reliant on views and ad revenue, which is why they have just embraced it and often use it rather ironically.
honestly, that's for other people to figure out and also not something i particularly concern myself. my take begins and ends at "prescribing people to a certain writing style is fairly pedantic and while certain writing styles carry more weight and should probably be used over other styles, i don't see a reason to force people onto any one standard without regard to nuance", and i find conversations on details like this to almost invariably be missing the forest for the trees when there are far more interesting and far bigger things that play a part in things like community dynamics.
Markdown is meant to be readable as plain text; I use it even on platforms that don't support it.
I may be particularly pedantic about this, but I always take all caps as aggressive speech / internet shouting, and never as emphasis.
W.r.t. titles, all the words in a title are supposed to be strongly emphasises to begin with. It is the shortest possible string of words that conveys a very brief summary of the content, so every word is important. Apart from function words that are not optional, only the essential stuff should be included in a title. (Take all of that with an implied IMHO BTW.)
In my opinion, titles shouldn't use all-caps for emphasis. People do it on YouTube to try to draw more attention to their videos in the Recommended lists, like the text equivalent of choosing sensationalized or attention-grabbing thumbnails.
It's just not really a valid approach to titling. You'd never see a serious media outlet like a well-known newspaper do it in their titles, and it isn't used in book titles, etc. It's solely for drawing attention on the internet.
Kind of unrelated but this did happen with the death of Hitler. But of course using a huge bold headline was completely warranted for that occasion.
Yes, I definitely think so. I really don't like posts trying to demand attention like that. Personally, this is why I don't like to see swear words in titles generally too.
Edit to add: One of the reasons I really like it here is the minimal look and ad free space. Having caps, swears, random emojis or punctuation to demand attention takes away from the more public face of Tildes and in a way, distracts from the content itself.
The Register does it a lot and it irks me so much I just don’t read their stuff any more. It’s a sign of poor editing and I consider it a form of clickbait. It doesn’t add anything to a title and only makes things worse.
Yeah, sorry about that. After I made my initial comment I realized it was unfair to clutter another topic with meta discussion and this issue was probably worthy of its own ~tildes topic anyways.
I echo the sentiment of others across this thread: all-caps words should be removed except for legitimate needs, such as acronyms, and certain stylistic uses. Reasonable judgment should be able to infer if an all-caps word is being used legitimately or merely as the author wanting to be a punchy attention grabber.
I think that titles should not have all-caps words (except of course for acronyms, initialisms, etc.). I am 100% for them being edited to remove all-caps. It it unnecessarily attention grabbing and just wrong.
However, title-case (That Is Like This) is perfectly fine by me. I think that is a natural way to deal with titles that aren't actual sentences and look nice enough.
I don't like it. With the exception of words or acronyms that are actually capitalized, I can't think of a situation where it would be required.
The only time I ever see it used is in clickbait political crap with titles like "Libtards get DESTROYED by FACTS and LOGIC"
I don't like it but not in favour of a blanket ban. Submitters should use good judgement on titles, tildes users should be able to manage that.
I don't care about emphasis in titles, I care about readability. I have even edited a couple of titles because they used Title Case and That Made the Title Less Readable than if it had been in normal case (for instance, where the title has a lot of proper nouns).
And, ALL CAPS is less readable than plain text - especially if there are also initialisms in the title!
However, it's ultimately subjective, and very much a case-to-case judgement call.
My eye skips over it unless the text that is capitalised is GONE SEXUAL, because those words strike a primal urge in me and I am then unable to avoid clicking on the content, liking and subscribing to it, and adding to their patreon.
Naw but seriously all caps is shouting and shouting on the internet is for noobs. Report/block/ban/downvote every time.
I'd say if that's how the article you're linking did it, keep it as is, but for anything you're submitting, just frame it like an introductory sentence, or a book/article title. This sort of emphasis can detract from the meaning of the sentence, and influence a reading of submitted content with either its addition or removal. Arguably, at least if an outside source does it you can preserve the context in which they wanted you to engage with their work.
Title gets control of what words are important in a sentence. I'll decide myself, thank you.
So if Deimos were to give you title editing ability, what would you do with it:
Would you always leave headlines exactly as they were originally written by the article author/editor, CAPITALIZATION for EMPHASIS and ALL, no MATTER how OBNOXIOUS it WAS?
If a Tildes users removed capitalization present in the article headline would you add that back in?
Would you only remove extraneous capitalization that Tildes USERS added in addition to the article headline?
Or would you go about adding capitalization to other people's titles where you personally felt it was appropriate?
Basically, what I'm asking is, where would you draw the line, and more importantly.... why? Because as someone with title editing ability, that is something I am concerned with since it's a determination I need to make myself.
I'd personally prefer original title but sensationalist / E M P H A S I S bits edited, or the original title + the poster's comment in the title like "Yadda yadda YADDA!" - What do you guys think?
I don't quite understand what you mean... so if you don't mind humoring me some more, to give a few concrete examples (from LTT since I don't want to pick on any particular tildes user here):
"This KEYBOARD has a BUILT IN MOUSE!"
"Intel is SERIOUSLY Threatening NVIDIA"
"Gaming on a 25 YEAR OLD Laptop!!"
"The GAMING Hot Tub!!"
Personally, my gut tells me to remove every instance of capitalization and even the exclamation points. But how would you handle each of those? And what if a tildes user was to add their own additional comment to them in the title with similar capitalization to it, (e.g. "This GAMING Hot Tub is AMAZING!!!")?
p.s. If I'm reading you right, you would remove all the capitalization (and exclamation points) as well, correct?
Yeah. I'm sorry if that wasn't clear, others have also told me I suck at explaining things today :p
Heh, no worries. I often suck at understanding people correctly... so it's probably a bit of both. ;) Thanks for clarifying it for me.
Title is definitely important, and though I agree the poster should have pretty heavy say in it, it's also in the "public" space of Tildes. And that needs to be respected too.