What's with People not Capitalizing the First Letter of a Sentence?
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I've noticed that a few people on this forum, especially new users asking for help with some problem with Vivaldi, don't capitalize the first letter of a sentence? What's up with that?
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@Eggcorn a lot of users dont have english as their first language, and others post with a mobile.
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@Pesala Mobile, I can see that. The Shift key might be trickery to use there. But not having English as a first language: I doubt it. If anything, I think that'd make someone more likely to use capitalization! If you're learning English as a second language: You'll probably learn to capitalize the first letter of a sentence, before you'll learn to make complex sentences and paragraphs.
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@Eggcorn said in What's with People not Capitalizing the First Letter of a Sentence?:
If you're learning English as a second language
Well, maybe they are not actually learning; just using what has been picked up on TV/Movies etc.
Of course, some people are just lazy (to be polite)!!
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@guigirl said in What's with People not Capitalizing the First Letter of a Sentence?:
I presume the incorrect over-capitalisation of your thread title is irony?
No. Frankly, I'm not too clear on what the capitalisation rules are for titles. I thought you were supposed to capitalize the first letter of every word in a title, except "basic" (for lack of a better term) words like "the" and "not". But I could be wrong, I really should look that up.
Anyway: There's a difference between being unclear on capitalisation rules for titles, and not capitalizing the first letter of a sentence.
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@Eggcorn said in What's with People not Capitalizing the First Letter of a Sentence?:
I'm not too clear on what the capitulation rules are for titles.
You got it right. It is called Title Case. Ideally, everyone would use it for Topic titles — I believe the rule is capitalise every word except prepositions and conjunctions.
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In googlish there are no capital letters.
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@Pesala said in What's with People not Capitalizing the First Letter of a Sentence?:
Ideally, everyone would use it for Topic titles
Are they names? I thought they were just summaries of what the topic is about.
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@guigirl There's a big difference between not being clear on capitalisation rules for titles, and not capitalizing the first letter of a sentence! If you can't see the difference, I can't help you.
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@potmeklecbohdan That's what a title is, a summary of what the topic (or book, or article, or whatever) is about.
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@Eggcorn Yeah but there is a difference between a title & a name. A title is semi-random & doesn’t need to be preserved in its exact form while a name is always the same.
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@potmeklecbohdan Perhaps, but I think I'm missing your point.
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@Eggcorn The topic title is just a summary that can be transformed & it’s still the same topic (it isn’t a name & there’s no reason for over-capitalisation). The name of a book should stay unchanged (& hence in English it should be over-capitalised / Title Cased).
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@guigirl To be honest: After thinking about what you said more, I'm disturbed by your mentality. You seem to be saying that I have to be perfect, to criticize anything or call for anything to be better. That I have to always eat right and get proper exercise, before I can tell people not to drink bleach (and yes, there are people who drink bleach). That I have to always use a VPN, a proxy, and the Tor network, before I can suggest a privacy-respecting browser such as Vivaldi. That I have to have perfect grammar, before I can expect people to capitalize the first letter of a sentence.
And that mentality, it gets in the way of progress. Because nobody's perfect! So no one can ever have standards, offer advice, or say that we need to improve anything.
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@guigirl I'll point you to the comic "Mister Gotcha" by Matt Bors. It uses humor to make the point I made, in my last post. But I don't really expect it to convince you, I think we're not going to see eye-to-eye on this.
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@potmeklecbohdan said in What's with People not Capitalizing the First Letter of a Sentence?:
The topic title is just a summary that can be transformed & it’s still the same topic (it isn’t a name & there’s no reason for over-capitalisation). The name of a book should stay unchanged (& hence in English it should be over-capitalised / Title Cased).
I don't think so. This thread has a name, and that name isn't "Why aren't People Capitalizing the First Letter of a Sentence?". I could have named it that (that name would have worked just fine), but I didn't. I named it "What's with People not Capitalizing the First Letter of a Sentence?". And shouldn't the name of a thread should stay unchanged, unless there's some reason to rename it?
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@Eggcorn It seems that neither of us can convince the other to change opinion — okay, will stop trying after this post. Just saying that capital &/ large letters are hard to read for me &→ the less the better
To your question: I could say capitalisation debate when referring to this topic — & still it leaves a different, titley feeling than topic about capitalisation (so it doesn’t work like if I referred to a book called Recipes of Our Grandmothers as my favourite cookbook where there’s a fixed name for it).
Sure, some topics can have names, but only when it makes sense.
I don’t cook & that book may not exist, it was just an example.
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It's just pure laziness, nothing less. It isn't difficult to shift case on a mobile device either.
This does not apply to people not familiar with English.
.
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@PrivacyMatters I have a mobile only because I had to get one for emergencies. I tried to type “MINUTES” by pressing the mno button, but all I can get is an uppercase O, a lowercase n, or a 6. I am sure that others can do better, but it is far from easy to type on a mobile keypad. And, yes, I have read the manual.
Write text
Writing with the keypad is easy and fun.
Press a key repeatedly until the letter is shown.
Type in a space Press 0.
Type in a special character or punctuation mark Press *.
Switch between character cases Press # repeatedly.
Type in a number Press and hold a number key. -
@Eggcorn said in What's with People not Capitalizing the First Letter of a Sentence?:
Because nobody's perfect!
well that's dependent upon the interpretation of the term 'perfect' which is not perfect in itself or universal.
i don't think guigirl was suggesting what you think she was suggesting.
it seems to me that she was just pointing out some interesting ironies.anyway, as someone who learned english properly and is quite familiar with the rules of capitalization, i can tell you specifically why i don't capitalize anything in web convos or emails:
- i find it faster to type without capitals
- i find looking for the shift key tedious
- i feel it is inequitable to subject certain letters to capital punishment
the only time i end up with capitals is when i speak text on my phone or tablet, so that's really not my fault.
i can see that some people would find it harder to read if they are used to capitals being in certain locations, but i haven't had anyone complain in a quarter of a century. that could possibly be because they found many other things about me to complain about.
a belated greetings to you!