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Comment by derpyzza | Hacker News Reader

huh i didn't even notice, that's how i write all my blog posts too. it looks nicer to me and i don't have to bother checking for "proper" capitalization if everything's just lowercase anyway.

didn't realize people struggled to read text that way though, maybe i should change my writing style if this is a common pain point

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I personally find it slower to read text without capitalization. It helps me visually chunk information from different sentences, in the same way that line breaks separate ideas into different paragraphs. Without it, it’s sort of like a wall of text that I have to read more carefully to parse (although a closer reading perhaps isn’t bad).

A lot of the problem here is that the overall typography on this site is not particularly great. Better leading and tracking, narrower columns, bigger font would go a long way.

If you do everything else right you can skip sentence cap without sacrificing readability. Not that you necessarily should but it's a vibe if you want it, it suits some voices & documents well.

I'm sort of wondering why you think we capitalize the beginning of sentences if not to help the reader.

i just figured it was mainly stylistic tbh. something that may have been a relic of some past limitation that we kept around just because it was "how it's always done". didn't really realize it actually helps people with reading, it's never really bothered me

For what is worth, it is incredibly jarring to me as well (I am a middle millennial, not a boomer, and usually not prescriptivist about writing style). My knee-jerk reaction (I know, book by the cover...) is that it is probably not worth reading given that the writer did not think it is worth making it easy to read.

To me, it reads like a lazy fifth grader wrote it that just couldn't be bothered to press the shift key.

But this is not laziness, it's deliberately done signal being cooler than the rest.

It sucks.

(So does not adding a period at the end of a sentence)

> (So does not adding a period at the end of a sentence)

Yeah, it does

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