Except it isn't trivial; it materially damaged the ease with which I could read the essay.
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.
(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))))
e. e. cummings might have a thing or two to say about a thing or two regarding the use of capitalization. It can be worthwhile to overlook or adapt to someone's stylistic peccadilloes if the ideas they have are interesting and useful.
Not that I'm casting judgment in regards to that in what either Naggum or cummings wrote! ;-)
> Capitalizing the first word of a sentence can also lose information.
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.
He's also inconsistent. He capitalizes 'I' and Emacs and Lisp (among other things).
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?
How does a German adapt? Poorly. I nearly stopped reading because of that.
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...
It's funny, because his capitalization and punctuation are his conscious decisions he wrote about quite a few times. He said it is easy to programmatically upcase first words of the sentences, but it is no easy to do it the other way, without losing meaning. Sentences without first word capitalized are also easier to manipulate.
I personally have no problem with reading text written in a such way.
