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my love of lowercase
- sputnik sweetheart
- Sep 8
- 3 min read
hellooo—
on monday afternoon, i saw that my most recent blog went live. i went to check on it, and immediately noticed that something was... off.
they stormed the capital (letters)!
the blog had been capitalized!
down with capitalism!
shocker, i know. hope this blog's title didn't spoil anything for you.
what i was genuinely shocked by was how much of a reaction i had to this alteration. for some reason, it didn't feel right. it didn't sound like me. i felt like the entire tone was different. but why? this was technically the "correct" way of writing. and nothing else had changed; the format, words, everything was identical to what i submitted. it was objectively not a big deal.
i then thought of the tweet featured above.
i turned off auto-caps in middle school. i'm now pushing 27 (jk) and i still haven't turned it back on.
so then i began to wonder, am i sick in the head?
i want to preface that this isn't me being petty LOL. the editors were super chill and fixed it right away. and while we're at it, shoutout to the writing center for helping me make an outline for this blog.
anyways, let's figure this out together.
on a base level, i just like how it looks. sue me! it's softer and more comfortable to read, in my opinion.
i also feel like it's closer to how i talk in real life, and i want to convey my personality through my writing as much as i can. i think most people would agree that i'm pretty quiet, and so are lowercase letters.
there is an overall sense of creativity conveyed through only using lowercase. it's more stylized, more deliberate, goes against convention. this style can be a defining part of a writer's identity. think rupi kaur, e.e. cummings, bell hooks, albeit they opted for lowercase for vastly different reasons. (honestly feels illegal to even group them together, but i have a point to make.)
a few contemporary bloggers i really like type like this-
threadings: https://www.threadings.io/author/ismatu/
this blog wasn't always the all lowercase zone you know and love. my first few posts were "normal." (here's one example.) if you really look back, you can see that i kind of alternate between the two, but that there is a clear trend towards lowercase. the "normal" posts definitely read more formal, and feel a bit more distant. so what came first? the shift in subject matter or lettercase? who's to say. but these shifts chart my levels of comfort with my writing.
most people associate lowercase-typing with the internet, ergo young people, ergo informality. i don't completely disagree with these things. lowercase letters make me think of my own adolescence, and twitter and tumblr and kik and snapchat, or, broadly, texting in general, and i think that's part of the appeal. it feels like conversation, it feels nostalgic.
in fact, there's something almost disingenuous about capitalizing words as they should be. that's for emails and essays. all lowercase is more intuitive and seems "more focused" on just getting the message across. is this contradictory to what i said three paragraphs ago? about lowercase being more stylized? yes.
so, maybe that's it? is this a form of sprezzatura? a very calculated way of looking effortless?
final conclusion: idk
well, that's all i got.
did i overthink this?
yes.
did i have fun?
yes.
did you have fun??
tbd.
all i know is that i'm going to type like this until the day i die.
see ya next week,
sputnik sweetheart ⋆˙⟡♡
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