Chat

I don't think it matters. We're just chatting on the internet, who cares about proper formatting and such. You do you!

I do try to maintain proper grammar and capitalization online (to a reasonable degree), and, though I try not to, I've built a judgmental perspective against those who don't. It's not really about things like capitalization, though. The root of it lies in the baseline level of effort that's expected in order to contribute.

I truly don't understand the way some people choose to participate in online forums. In any large enough (and unmoderated) community, there are just pages and pages of single-line, uncapitalized, unpunctuated, emoji-strewn nonsense. None of these individually is a problem, but as a whole it seems to represent a fundamental lack of care about the quality of discussion.

But hey, maybe I've just become a crotchety bastard.

I don't mind if you take Earl Gray for your tea, or simply earl gray. It's things like neglecting to put in paragraph breaks and a complete lack of punctuation that really bother me.

I also have a bias against u/ur etc. but I'm annoyingly pedantic about things like that. If Weird Al mocked it in "Word Crimes", it's likely on my list of peeves.

I believe Reddit is to blame... because everything bad comes from them right?

And I fully support your hypothesis here!

Regardless of how you choose to write things out, it's always good to see another feline based username in these parts.

imo writing is for communication, and especially capitalisation adds very little to how communicative a given text is

lack capitalisation and dots actually makes me feel more at ease reading something, if anything

makes it feel more casual and the like

I think when you're communicating, it's good etiquette to make sure people can read your post easily - your five minutes could save hundreds or thousands of people time.

That said, capitalisation isn't required, as long as it's clear. I think line breaks are more important.

I do take it as a signal that the writer might be worth listening to if they've bothered to take the care to get their thoughts and fingers in order - as opposed to some stream of conscious babble that you can read multiple times and still not sure if you've understood it.

I used to use Swype and now I use Gboard and both do capitalisation and other handy things like double space to end a sentence - maybe check your settings.

I've been trying to get better about capitalization and stuff like that over the past couple months. Typically I switch styles depending on where I'm typing/who I'm talking to, but the more I think about it, it doesn't really take me any extra time to do things correctly on the first pass.

You should type however you feel most comfortable though, and in whatever way you feel captures your voice!

Linguistic forms that are associated with younger people and/or the internet tend to be stigmatized because of what I like to call the "WELL BACK IN MY DAY" sort of ideologies that shit on anything new. A lot of discourse about allegedly "bad" and "wrong" language is actually rooted in ideologies that stigmatize certain linguistic forms because of who they're associated with. But it becomes so widely repeated that these linguistic forms are "bad", and even people or organizations that portray themselves as authorities on language are saying that they're "bad", and so it simply becomes a "fact" that they're "bad".

a lot of times i don't capitalize things either, and i'm a linguist. you should do whatever makes you happy. :)