CAPS - And why they are frowned upon

I bet many of you have been badgered by DN mods to stop using CAPS in the Public Chat. Many of these members respond with the simple question ""Why are caps bad?". Well, by the end of this topic I hope you will have this question answered for you! My goal for this topic is to have you know why caps should not be used in the Public Chat on DN.

NOTE: I am speaking about the English language (NA). Other languages or cultures have different purposes for certain things.

What are CAPS?
Caps is exactly what it sounds like. A capital letter. Now, in the English language the first letter of every sentence is made into a capital letter (other words like I and names/nouns have special cases where they recieve a captial letter for the first letter E.X Vantagesp). Now, normally all the other letters in the sentence are lower case, like this. Typing in CAPS means you are USING ALL CAPITAL LETTERS FOR EACH LETTER!

Some Reasons why this is bad:

-Caps are meant to emphasize words. ex. DO NOT use the Elevator! The words "do" and "not" have a lot of emphasis on them now that they are completely capitalized, and they are more noticeable. "Do not" is an important part of the sentence and emphasizing it is a good idea to make it more of a focal point. "do not use the elevator" is kind of bland and not as noticeable. When you use caps to emphasize a whole sentence it makes its point rendered useless. The contrast in letter case is suppose to make the visual difference. "DO NOT USE THE ELEVATOR!" is still very noticeable, but it also is harder to read. They are harder to read due to the absence of the ascenders and descenders found in lower-case letters, which can aid recognition. By using all caps, it just makes the main purpose of CAPS useless.

-Using all caps looks completely obnoxious if abused. "WHY WOULD YOU SAY THAT!?" looks really mean. "Why would you say that?" sounds a lot better and more respectable. CAPS is used for Tone as well. Using caps makes it seem like you are yelling at someone, or screaming. This makes people feel uncomfortable, because generally, no one likes to get yelled at (unless you are in to that kind of thing...). You are emphasizing your entire sentence, making it seem over important and loud.

- Using all CAPS looks spammy. CAPS and overuse of punctuation such as "!"s and "?"s makes it seem even more spam like. This is not good. People will not take you very serious if you type like this. You don't want to be a joke do you? Also, Mixing CAPS and lower-case letters makes it look even spammier. Let us look at this sentence:

Respectable sentence

"I like Hockey!"

Fine as well, putting emphasis on a specific word

"I REALLY like Hockey!"

Using all CAPS it looks spammy

"I LIKE HOCKEY"

Using caps and absuing Punctuation makes it look really spammy

"I REALLY LIKE HOCKEY!!#@$@%@??!??@"

Now combining everything to make one horrendous looking sentence...

"I ReAlly lIKe HoCkeY !@!^@?!!!"

Now lets include bad spelling to make it look worse

"I ReLLy LieK HoKEY#!#@$"

Now some bad grammer

"i LIKE HokCEY !!! RAeaLLy!@@"

This one is really bad.... Internet speak combined with the rest

"i lIk Hoky!!1"

Now the worst.... swears and the rest

"i fU**eN LIec HaWkY!@@Y@YU@"

See how progressively annoying/bad that simple sentence got? The last few are just awful to read...

This is popular troll speak, meant to disrupt other members because it is hard to read and is visually appalling .


Now I hope you learned why using CAPS all the time and abusing them with other things like bad grammar and over-use of punctuation is a bad idea. It just looks awful and makes you look like a bad poster or a troll.

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