From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri Feb 01 2002 - 00:03:40 MST
At 10:38 PM 1/31/02 -0700, animated silicon love doll wrote:
>2002.01.31 21:24:08, Damien Broderick <d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au>
wrote:
>>i know, he keeps using those damned capital letters. it's too hard
>
>yep! if you ask nicely i might actually capitalize, though
I wish you would. The issue is not trivial, and not just grumpy
conservatism. The protocols we use to read swiftly and accurately get
highly tuned to orthography and other modifiable parameters. Capitalization
saves me (and most people) from having to scan every goddam sequence of
letters for a small period at the end of the sentence. Like DNA, the
Hellenic Greeks, as I recall dimly from those days, didn't use spaces
between words either; that made reading even harder, and might explain why
everyone until quite recently mouthed every word they read. Your personal
aesthetic quirk imposes a real deficit on all the rest of us; it slows us
up, and worse than that it requires that a thoroughly automated process
gets dragged up several steps into consciousness, or near enough, which
damages your readers' concentration on what you're communicating.
Damien Broderick
[Semiotics 101]
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