Here’s the deal. People cannot hear the tone of your voice through the computer — whether you are writing an email, posting something on a social media site or chatting someone up. The intonation and inflection in one’s voice do a great deal to show the vibe of a conversation. So can facial expressions, hand gestures and the tiniest body movements.
This is why I think caps lock should be BANNED on all computers. All it does is confuse people. It is common knowledge that an all-capped word or phrase is used to show emphasis. The problem is that nobody knows whether you’re excited or pissed the hell off. We can’t see the big grin on your face. We can’t see you dancing around behind your computer. We just see those damn capital letters, staring us in the face, mocking our mere existence in this world.
Therefore, I would greatly appreciate it if we reduced — hell, let’s just eliminate — all-caps typing.
Now I understand there are times when you really want to put that caps lock on and go to town. Maybe you’re congratulating someone on a recent accomplishment. You feel the need to use those capped letters and show your total and complete delight for them. Here’s a new concept: PICK UP THE PHONE! The person on the other end of the line will rejoice at hearing your cheery voice and will appreciate the fact that you took time out of your busy day to let them know how proud you are of them.
We live in a world where gadgets have limited our face-to-face interaction with our species counterparts instead of increasing them. We are now able to type out our thoughts and go back and ERASE items we do not like. Let’s use this fantastic feature to comb through our thoughts before hitting that dreadful “send” button. Keep in mind the fact that ALL CAPS can signify a meaning that you are not intending. Your positive words could, in fact, hurt someone’s feelings.
Nobody likes to feel like shit. Nobody likes to make someone else feel like shit unintentionally — unless you’re the devil and therefore have other problems you need to deal with. So please, oh PLEASE, think twice before you press down on that caps lock button. Let’s banish caps for good.
I THANK YOU.
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Ha this is a cute post. Not to mention I just had a meltdown with 2 professors over caps lock and the misconstrued emotion that’s hard to voice through a petty message. You have a really light heart I wish more people were like that..
It took years of work to get the owners/managers at my company to stop using all-caps all the time. They aren’t strong typers, so for them it eliminated the need to use shift. Later they heard that it meant they were yelling at people in their communications. For reasons I still do not understand they have one hold out area. Work orders are still done in all-caps. “CHECK AND REPAIR PROBLEM WITH BALLAST”, “INSTALL GENERATOR”.
Oh well. You can only change people a little bit at a time.
Just recently we did manage to change the use of exclamation and question marks from multiples (“were you responsible for this?????”) to singles (“your department?”)
Big moves.
Here here! That way no one will yell at me, and if they’re actually using caps to say something funny, I get to hear it in person –