A capital offense

This is kind of embarrassing to admit. But let’s face it -- you’ve probably already noticed. This blog uses capital letters -- and punctuation, too.

How very uncool.

It seems many of the cool people – c’mon, you know who I’m talking about, you’ve known them since seventh grade, they’re always lurking in the hallways, flashing their logo’d casual wear and pretending not to be living and dying by every nanosecond of attention they can attract – want to make the Internet a capitalization-free and punctuation-optional zone.

Not that I’m an absolutist about this. For example, many of us cut corners when instant messaging… it’s kind of what that medium is all about. And I can buy losing the caps when it’s a design choice. Logos and imagemaps and such that don’t use capitals almost always look sleek and elegant.

But your more standard electronic forms of written communication -- e-mails, message board postings and even, yes, blog posts -- do not exist to look sleek and elegant. They exist to communicate information in verbal form. Style is allowed, but the minute your stylistic choices start interfering with reader comprehension -- like say if i were to suddenly stop punctuating or capitalizing so that you thought when i said your life is over I was threatening you rather than telling you i had borrowed your copy of a classic board game -- well, that’s when I tend to get a little pissy.

If you want everything to be pretty all the time, go make visual art. If you want to write, write. As with any other artistic discipline, certain rules apply and some you can bend or even break to your advantage. But sacrificing reader comprehension for some illusion of hipper-than-thou appearance is just you trying futilely once again to be one of the cool kids. And it isn’t, and you aren’t, and why in the world would you want to be, anyway? As long as Cameron Crowe is uncool, that’s the crowd I want to hang with.