What is with this guy's aversion to uppercase?
It's easier to rearrange words in a sentence and join or split sentences in a paragraph if the first word of a sentence is not capitalized.
Capitalizing the first word of a sentence can also lose information.
It's also helpful to identify people who focus on the trivial.
As a long-time English reader, I've internalized the idea that there will be a capital letter at the beginning of a sentence. So when it's lacking, especially when the beginning of a sentence corresponds to a newline as in the beginnings of paragraphs in this essay, my immediate mental response is to assume that I've overshot the sentence's beginning, and immediately to backtrack to find it.
Overriding this behavior takes mental effort which detracts from the ease with which I can read. Making it harder for your readers to consume your ideas is hardly a trivial issue.
Not that I'm casting judgment in regards to that in what either Naggum or cummings wrote! ;-)
(defun capitalize-naggum () "Capitalizes text written in Erik Naggum's annoying no-caps style" (interactive) (save-excursion (goto-char (point-min)) (aux-naggum (point))))
(defun aux-naggum (current-point) "Recursively capitalize the buffer, moving sentence to sentence. Valid punctuation symbols are [.?!]" (re-search-forward "[a-z]" nil 0 nil) (if (= current-point (point)) t (capitalize-word -1) (re-search-forward "[.!?]") (aux-naggum (point))))
Only if you are using a lousy keyboard layout for your language. I'm a native French speaker, and my layout (Bépo) let me type ÉÈÊÀÆŒ without having to remember any weird combination.
I can't think of significant loss of information besides diacritics.
I've never heard this, but are you talking about proper nouns that override regular words?
It's also helpful to identify people who focus on the trivial.
Would you say the same thing about txt spk, or does that cross the line for you?
edit: s/pronouns/proper nouns/
sigh
Written text is supposed to be written to be parsed by humans. Why do people forget that?
I remember a study that said people read based on shapes of words, particularly ascenders, descenders and edges (i.e., first and last letters). Does capitalizing the first letter of the sentence make a difference? If it does, do people that read languages like German which has more capitalization (but the same script) adapt to it?
It freakes out my wetware text parser to have two spaces before punctuation and no capitalization at the beginning of sentences. At least he did not put punctuation inside quotes...
I personally have no problem with reading text written in a such way.
No, you're missing the point.
Naggum didn't eschew all capital letters, only where they led to loss of information (ie. failure to separate common and proper nouns).
Emacs and Lisp are proper nouns and therefore capitalized. Common nouns that happen to start a sentence are not.