Netiquette and capital letters

Tuesday 8th September 2009

In the wake of the recent sacking of a woman from New Zealand for composing and sending emails that used lots of capital letters (including bold and red-coloured text), Laura Schocker of BBC News Magazine poses the question "Why do CAPITAL LETTERS so annoy us?". She goes onto describe the historical traditions of capital letters in print and how the traits of typographers have influenced today's web users.

When writing emails or blog posts on the internet, the use of italics and bold text is the recommended way to emphasise a word or phrase, however more recently the use of capital letters seems to have become the accepted norm. Perhaps it's laziness (just hold down the Shift key when typing) or just igorance (not knowing how to make text bold or italic) but the use of capital letters these days is regarded as aggressive behaviour or poor etiquette.

Our advice? Follow the simple rules of netiquette (net etiquette) and you'll be fine.

capital letters, email etiquette, shouting, netiquette

posted by Blair Millen in the category: help & advice