I'm not saying you should stop capitalizing, mind you -- there's value in standardized orthography. But it's a good idea to set your horizon beyond it. I've noticed that I've become much more flexible and less dogmatic about things like this since looking at a bunch of other languages and writing systems and recognizing written communication as spectrum.

This is really more a social thing and about what the choice not to use capitalization communicates, i.e. you may be reacting negatively because you read it as a "I do not care to conform" or "I do not care about your appraisal of my writing" marker. Which is understandable, but I wonder if that isn't a too-quick judgement to serve as a rule.

So why the heck is not capitalizing your sentences ok? Language is a tool to communicate with the masses. We have rules and standards so everyone can understand them. If you can't do that effectively, then you have failed in your communication.

The two examples aren't the same, and the reasons a reader experiences discomfort reading your example text are different. They're about ergonomics. The erratic variations in letter footprints and the up-and-down-and-up from the ascender line to the x-height and back affect reading speed. It's also spurious; the capitalization style in your example doesn't add additional information.

Try giving some thought to capitalization along those lines. Does capitalization add information that otherwise isn't explicit? How does it affect reading speed?

The anwers are roughly "yes, sometimes" and "yes, sometimes" (the latter depends a lot on how you define "reading speed/performance"; "reading" decomposes into a set of different types of interacting with text, like searching, information/keyword retention, etc). You can call this a good case for capitalization, but I'm not convinced it's a given, and competing writing systems do get by well without it.

> We have rules and standards so everyone can understand them.

Sorta. "Understand" is a big topic to broach, see above. It's of course true that shared language and shared orthography enable sophisticated communication and grease its wheels. And in that light, not conforming may suggest an exclusionary attitude (just like e.g. excessive use of jargon can be motivated by tribalism). But it's not where I'd personally draw the line; I'd read a text rather than dismiss it beforehand based solely on a lack of capital letters.

> If you can't do that effectively, then you have failed in your communication.

The many other comments discussing the actual information content of the text seem to suggest that it hasn't.

Technically the (tiny, one-pixel) period is there, but personally I cue off capital letters rather than punctuation when dividing sentences in my head. They are also helpful when skimming. They provide easy-to-spot anchors at which to resume reading.

Seriously, just look at what I've written. Blur your eyes and slide over the text. You can see the capitol letters from a mile away, can't you? While the periods fade into the page.

Of course there's a complex interaction between letter and punctuation design there - if we didn't use capital letters, our full stop marks might be bigger instead. And perhaps that would be more elegant than having two versions of every letter. Now, that's of course a "what if ..." and not a practical argument that should affect your blog post today. (Nor is it an exhaustive argument, emphasized sentence beginnings aren't the same as emphasized sentence ends.)

But it's super-interesting that you bring up periods, because they're a great example of rules vs. the reality of written communication. The rules require ending sentences in periods, but a vast number of people start dropping them when the medium has an implicit full stop, like chats (IRC, SMS, ...) do (line/message end = full stop). Instead the period becomes repurposed as a sort of "aggression mark": http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115726/period-our-simples...

But the latin alphabet is apparently the most common alphabet. I don't really see your argument here.

As for modern Latin (Latin originally didn't have letter case, either; widespread use of letter case is a fairly recent development), most common doesn't mean best - how the "market share" of languages and writing systems evolves is a more complex topic (Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World is a good book). That means looking at and comparing with other examples is often useful.

It's a little like the reason you want to learn more than one programming language - it trains your ability to think about problems on a more abstract level than a single toolbox allows, and gives you insight into the strengths and weaknesses of each of your tools and how to apply them best. Even if you wind up only programming in a single language anyway. It also tends to make you less dogmatic and more willing to go back to first princples. Or willing to entertain notions like "just because this man isn't capitalizing his letters it doesn't necessarily mean he has nothing to tell me".

2nd-order cybernetics is about observing the observer, which includes observing the limitations of communication. Studying different languages helps identify the limitations of each, i.e the untranslateables. There's a great book on this topic (we need an equivalent for software), a 1300 page "Dictionary of Untranslateables".

http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/07/16/h...

"This depends on what one means by “untranslatable.” Cassin and her team believe that an “untranslatable” word is not one that cannot be translated, but rather a word we can’t stop trying to translate, aware always that we haven’t quite hit it, that it isn’t right."

And the fact that we're discussing it here in this thread makes your point stand - it detracts from the message trying to be conveyed.