Texters' capital offence

Richard Butt
26/ 2/2008

I BLAME kd lang. It was she who began this using-lower-case-is-hip-and-trendy malarkey.

Now it’s everywhere. Nobody, it seems, has any regard for the mores of punctuation any more. Or the sensibilities of the reader.

It’s not just text messages, although I suspect I’m one of the few texters in the world who uses semicolons and spells out words such as ‘to,’ ‘two’ or ‘too’ and ‘you’. Prince’s song is Nothing Compares to You in my world.

I get a lot of emails that contain not a single capital letter. That makes them hard to read. I cannot tell when one sentence has ended and another has begun.

It’s not just lazy, it’s just plain rude to not use proper punctuation. There are TWO shift keys on your keyboard, people. Use them!

The lower-case epidemic coincided with website names, which also eschew capital letters. It became terribly turn of the millennium to ditch proper punctuation.

Of course, Channel M’s logo is all in lower case. But that’s a logo. And I’d better make an exception for logos. Otherwise, I’ll get a stiff talking to.

Some companies insist on using only lower case letters in their actual names. There is an airline called bmibaby. It breaks the rules of punctuation as a form of marketing. If I had a goat, that sort of thing would get on it. Meanwhile, back to my moan about email etiquette… everyone gets so many emails these days, they’ve become more of a hindrance than a help.

What is the point of attachments? Especially if they contain only text.

Here is my Golden Rule of Emails. Word document attachments are never worth opening. So I’ve stopped doing so.

In my job, I get stacks and stacks of them. If I’m off for a fortnight I normally have 1,500 or so unread emails on my return, so I’ve got to be ruthless. If I opened everything with an attachment on it I’d never get to eat, sleep or wee.

Use an attachment if you must, but copy and paste the words into the email too. Save us a lot of time and energy.

I’ve come to the conclusion that anyone who uses attachments for text hasn’t got a lot to do all day.

Also, I wish people would fill in their subject line with a relevant title. We get a lot of emails with subject lines of ‘press release’. Gee, you don’t say. I bet the police get emails with subject headings such as ‘crime’ and banks get emails about ‘my account’.

There should be a new term for email-induced anxiety.

Richard Butt edits Channel M’s early evening news – every weeknight from 5pm