SUMMARY - USAGE: (No) Capitals in "I", "you" and one's e-mail (signature) - long

[Dr Rita Puzmanova <rita -at- EXT -dot- EPE -dot- CZ>]

(Note: The following summary is allowed by the list owner on the
condition that I "explicitly state that the issue of email correctness
isn't open for further discussion on TECHWR-L")

Dear all,

Based on the query I raised last week I would like to share with you the
results. I will split up the two topics: English and other languages
rules of spelling (namely related to the usage of capital letters).

There were many replies to the topic which led to the discussion
(off-list) on the relevance, implications, and impacts of the spelling
correctness in professional e-mails (including postings on the
professional mailing list, like this one). The following is a summary of
all the replies (without stating authors of individual contributions as
many of them repeated the similar reasons). ("RP" denotes my comment.)

1)      CAPITALS IN ENGLISH (Note: any out of common usage of capitals in
this message should be attributed to the necessity to create headers or
emphasis)

GRAND RESULT: It is never grammatically correct in English to use "i"
instead of "I" (for the pronoun) and start a new sentence with lower
case.

Summary of opinions and reasons why some people break these grammatical
rules:

+ INFORMALITY:
- e-mail is quick, less formal and more conversational method of
communication (RP: isn't e-mail replacing gradually other "formal" means
of written communication, e.g. fax or letter?);
- rarely, if at all, people use a spell checker or proof their e-mails
before they send them out (RP: do they care about the reader?);
- people are less concerned with how they get the thought out than with
getting it out;
- in forums such as the mailing lists, people try to ignore "style"
(meaning grammar, spelling, punctuation) in the messages and focus on
content (RP: only try?)

+ STYLE:
- some people simply refuse to be bound by common usage;
- personal (email) style, "bon plaisir", relax or fun (RP: for authors
yes for readers might not be);
- to make the messaging more casual;
- a rhetorical strategy;
- an affectation (a pretense or false display);
- mindless fashion to give new tech a new look, and add a pinch of
sub-literacy from the techie brigade;
- an artificial behavior adopted to impress others;
- "whispering" the message;
- being rebellious (RP: against whom?);
- Edward Estlin Cummings' style (a poet who thought it was a cool thing
to never use a capital letter, even when he wrote his name);
- Archie's style (Don Marquis wrote about Archie, a cockroach in love
with Mahitabel the Cat ... Archie, being a cockroach, was unable to
press both the CAPS key and the desired letter and therefore wrote all
his epistles  to his lady love or chronicled their adventures all in
lower case).

+ LACK OF TYPIST SKILLS (SIMPLIFICATION) & LAZINESS:
- people are lazy;
- writers don't hold the shift key down long enough;
- people just don't want to bother with the shift key;
- many people cannot be bothered to extend the extra finger to create
capital letters;
- LACK of an editor in the house (!) to proofread.

+ MEANING:
- to deemphasize that what one is saying appears self-centered, without
taking the time to wordsmith.

+ CHARACTER'S CONFUSION:
- some fonts do offer the potential for confusing upper-case I,
lowercase L, and the numeral 1.

+ HISTORICAL REASONS:
- in the early days of computers (large mainframes) and e-mail,
computers typed in all caps to begin with so pressing the shift key made
no impact and people got used to not pressing it;
- custom of lowercasing everything comes from IRC groups;
- internet concept of capitals in a message being equivalent to
shouting;
- "THIS WAS BECAUSE THE TELETYPE MACHINES IN USE ONLY USED A FIVE BIT
CODE FOR DATA TRANSMISSION. SPEED WAS ABOUT SIXTY WORDS PER MINUTE.
NUMBERS WERE ON A SEPARATE FIGS SHIFT CODE THAT WAS NOT ALWAYS USED
BECAUSE TRANSMISSION ERRORS MIGHT MASK A MISSING FIGS SHIFT AND SO THE
NUMBER 2468 MIGHT READ WRYI. THIS WAS BECAUSE THE NUMBERS WERE SHARED
WITH THE TOP ROW OF LETTERS -- Q AND ONE 1 WERE THE SAME CODE DEPENDING
IF A LTRS OR FIGS SHIFT HAD OCCURRED BEFORE THE LETTER WAS SENT.
LATER PRINTERS INCLUDED FEATURES SUCH AS UNSHIFT ON SPACE THAT CAUSED
FAULTS IF YOU DROPPED A BIT AND INTERPRETED A CHARACTER AS A SPACE OR A
FIGS CODE OR A LTRS CODE IN THE MIDDLE OF A BLOCK OF NUMBERS. SINCE MOST
COMMUNICATIONS WERE WORDS, UNSHIFT ON SPACE COVERED UP MISSED LTRS
SHIFTS AND SAVED THE TELETYPE OPERATOR FROM HAVING TO REMEMBER TO DO
LTRS."
- all lower case as a habit to be sure the passwords, usernames, etc.,
will work;
- "another bet: the people who write without capitals were newspaper
journalists.  They had to have speed as one of their goals, so they
couldn't spend any time hitting the shift key. Many newspaper reporters
used to send their stories in by wire or telegram, so they also made up
shorthand ways of saying things.  For example, instead of saying "I do
not know why" they'd write "i unknow why..." because telegrams cost by
the word, so they had to pay for only 3 words instead of 5.  After the
story was received back at the newspaper office, the editors would fix
the capitals and wording. It was simply to save money."

+ HEALTHY REASONS:
- physical afflictions exacerbating carpal tunnel syndrome and/or
tendonitis;
- broken pinky finger (i.e., the little one that hits the "Shift" key to
type a capital letter).

+ HUMOR (RP: no, the other headings are not humorous and I have doubt
even on this one):
- "Sometimes it's because I'm not feeling very good about myself and
don't feel as though I deserve an uppercase."

+ Truly AMERICAN contributions:
- "Most of the list members are American, and we justifiably have the
reputation of informality. Our e-mail communication style is another
reflection of that informality. However, I think we all are very careful
and formal in our e-mail when the situation warrants, such as responding
to a job opening or corresponding with a government office."
- "it is acceptable to criticize my message, but not my method of
expressing it"
- "in the case of us americans (RP: you see that?), it's a style thing,
rather than a syntactical thing".

++NAME special (all lowercase):
- to distinguish among the same names on the list;
- to be slightly different;
- humility.

Now for problems, consequences and suggestions.

PROBLEMS (RP: not only mine as show the responses I got):

1) Lack of proper capitalization and, in general, all spelling mistakes
may not contribute to ease reading and comprehension. Mistakes may be
insulting the recipient and may be distracting and irritating. Messages
with obvious (spelling) mistakes (easily curable by a simple run of a
spell checker) may show lack of care for readers, may implicitly mean
the sender is not very considerate person of the others. If the
originator of a message relaxes while putting words down the recipient
can hardly do so while reading the same message.

2) Bypassing the spelling rules may not seem very suitable for the
professional lists where people strive to look for and look after the
proper language usage (namely in written form) and where there may be
thousands of recipients of each message posted.

3) It also "spoils" us, the non-native speakers, in the direction to
skip by far more rules than this one in our written communication. But
usually the contrary happens with us, we run spell checkers regularly to
lower the number of (unavoidable) mistakes we do commit while writing in
a foreign language.

SUGGESTION:
Could we make the extra effort to make any correspondence (namely
professional, including submissions to professional mailing lists) look
and be inherently really professional? After all, that is what we
represent - professional writers, translators or copyeditors!

2)      CAPITALS IN OTHER LANGUAGES - PRONOUNS (not a definite list, based
only on the responses received and my own experience):

- Czech - the formal "You" ("Vy", singular and plural), while informal
"you" ("ty") is lower case;
- Spanish - the formal "You" ("Usted" for singular, abbreviated as
"Ud.", and "Ustedes" for plural, abbreviated as "Uds."), while the
informal "you" ("tu") is lower case;
- Italian - the formal "You" ("Lei", the third person singular, and
"Loro", the third person plural), while third person singular "lei"
(lower case) is "she" and third person plural "loro" (lower case) is
"they" ;
- German - the formal "You" ("Sie", the third person), while informal
"you" ("du") is lower case;
- Swedish - the formal "You" ("Ni"), while informal "you" ("du") is
lower case;
- Danish - the formal "You" ("De"), while informal "you" ("du") is lower
case;
- Norwegian - the formal "You" ("De"), while informal "you" ("du") is
lower case.

The level of formality condition under which the capitalized pronoun is
used varies widely country by country,

The pronoun "I" is not capitalized in any of these languages.

Final note: any additions, corrections, suggestions to the above please
forward directly to me.

Rita Puzmanova
rita -at- ieee -dot- org

P.S. Selected and recommended further reading: the "Netiquette
Guidelines" specified in RFC 1855 (Request for Comment of Internet
Engineering Task Force) or "Speed vs accuracy in cyberspace", CW
On-Line, http://www.iabc.com/cw/jan2.htm

P.P.S. The original query and this summary is cross posted on other two
mailing lists. I apologize to all of you who might have received more
copies of this message.

 From ??? -at- ??? Sun Jan 00 00:00:00 0000=