Now If There’s One Thing I Cannot Abide It’s Unnecessary Capitalization. You know the sort of thing I mean. You see it every day and the most common offenders are usually headlines, signs or notices along the high street (although occasionally they do make an appearence here in supplied copy) and it’s in flagrant breach of English language laws. Common practice states you should only ever capitalise names of people, places, other proper nouns and the first letter of every sentence. Technically speaking ‘Internet’ and ‘web’ should be lower case however conversely ‘World Wide Web’, being a proper noun is correctly capitalised.

Many true believers are fond of capitalizing words, whether they are marketers or political junkies. If It’s Capitalized, It Must Be Important. In German, where all nouns are capitalized, it makes sense. However it makes absolutely no sense in English.

Not only that, but it’s commonly accepted that capitalized words are even harder to read as they break the natural flow of a sentence and inherent ’shape’ of words. Being relatively well educated in our mother tongue, when we read a line of text we don’t actually read every letter or every word – we pick up on and recognise the shape of words and it’s that inbuilt ‘predictive’ reading that allows us to scan or speed read a page of copy. Coming across capital letters in sentences where they shouldn’t be just breaks that flow and our brains have to stop and re-adjust, and that’s bad for the reader not to mention your message that you’ve spent long and hard sweating over.

So, until we here in Ancoats become “Studio Nord”, we’ll stick to customary English-language usage, if that’s Alright With You.

Check out Wikipedia for a full guide: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalization