4 ms·

Great article, but the lack of sentence capitalization makes it unnecessarily difficult to read. Apologies if this comment is off-topic, but it really is quite

Great article, but the lack of sentence capitalization makes it unnecessarily difficult to read. Apologies if this comment is off-topic, but it really is quite egregious, and since the article was submitted by the author I presume they are open to the feedback.

utopiah 18d ago
Array.from(document.body.querySelectorAll('p,li')).filter(e=>e.innerText).map(e=>e.innerText = e.innerText.split('\. ').map(s=>s[0].toUpperCase() + s.slice(1)).join('. ') ) Not perfect but hope it helps.
- utopiah 18d ago
  ~Gosh, getting downvoted for trying to help a stranger, what is wrong with you people?~ thanks for the upvotes, guess was just a misclick.
- pluc 18d ago
  Or just blink every time you see a period and hopefully miss the next letter
Lio 18d ago
Yep, I had the same thought. As simple heuristic, text written in all lowercase is often just hot takes and so not worth taking the time to read. LC;DR :P
- senordevnyc 18d ago
  I have a similar heuristic for short HN comments.
shantnutiwari 18d ago
" the lack of sentence capitalization makes it unnecessarily difficult to read." If it had proper caps etc, people here would accuse it of written using LLMs. You just can't win...
- N_Lens 18d ago
  > You just can’t win… That’s life )
- skinner927 18d ago
  You can ask an LLM to write in lowercase.
phist_mcgee 18d ago
I checked their whole site, it's all capitalised this way. It's definitely... unique?
mattacular 18d ago
Counter-point: Doesn't make it hard to read at all, definitely not "egregious" as it's a very common style to find for informal writing all over the internet. Author's own style is certainly refreshing and welcome over LLM slop that dominates most HN posts now.
- xdennis 18d ago
  > as it's a very common style to find for informal writing all over the internet No it's not. It's common in chats where those people don't bother with punctuation at all, often writing a single sentence over multiple lines. It's not common for blogs or long form content.
_superposition_ 18d ago
Threw me off too. Like why???
- danpalmer 18d ago
  It's a tech bro thing. Altman does it too, and I've worked with people in the past who do it. I read it as "I'll take literally any conscience for myself no matter how minor, at any cost for you no matter how big".
  - mackeye 18d ago
    why take the least charitable possible reading D; i've always read and intended it as inviting informality. i also don't find it harder to read at all (most people don't know some find it harder to read: i didn't)
    - _superposition_ 18d ago
      I didn't take it any particular way besides maybe a hint of informality. Regardless it definitely threw off my reading in an unpleasant way. Anecdata point for the poster maybe. I would read again.
    - danpalmer 17d ago
      I don't read it as informal. Childish or lazy perhaps, at best. When you intend it as "inviting informality", you're implicitly doing this because "formality" is too much effort. The thing is you're not inviting, but rather demanding. You have decided the conversation is informal and low effort, and that's how you'll treat it, without considering the person you're communicating with. This is of course all a lot of strong statements and these things don't matter as much as this sounds. I don't feel _that_ strongly about these things, but the lowercase thing always strikes me as just plain weird, and deconstructing why I feel that way this is where I get to.
  - thousand_nights 18d ago
    it's an internet thing. people were typing lowercase on IRC in the 90s.
derpyzza 18d ago
huh i didn't even notice, that's how i write all my blog posts too. it looks nicer to me and i don't have to bother checking for "proper" capitalization if everything's just lowercase anyway. didn't realize people struggled to read text that way though, maybe i should change my writing style if this is a common pain point
- krastanov 18d ago
  For what is worth, it is incredibly jarring to me as well (I am a middle millennial, not a boomer, and usually not prescriptivist about writing style). My knee-jerk reaction (I know, book by the cover...) is that it is probably not worth reading given that the writer did not think it is worth making it easy to read.
- cafebeen 18d ago
  I personally find it slower to read text without capitalization. It helps me visually chunk information from different sentences, in the same way that line breaks separate ideas into different paragraphs. Without it, it’s sort of like a wall of text that I have to read more carefully to parse (although a closer reading perhaps isn’t bad).
  - dcss_gardener 18d ago
    A lot of the problem here is that the overall typography on this site is not particularly great. Better leading and tracking, narrower columns, bigger font would go a long way. If you do everything else right you can skip sentence cap without sacrificing readability. Not that you necessarily should but it's a vibe if you want it, it suits some voices & documents well.
- cavemandaveman 18d ago
  To me, it reads like a lazy fifth grader wrote it that just couldn't be bothered to press the shift key.
  - emil-lp 18d ago
jaykru 18d ago
Hi! Thanks for the feedback. I've added an orthography toggle for those who prefer a more conventional look. I will add that I'm not very happy with the readability of my site overall at the moment; if anyone has font or other recommendations for style tweaks to make I'd love to hear them!
- yshklarov 18d ago
  Thanks! To expand a bit: It's clear from the writing that the formatting is an intentional stylistic choice. My point wasn't about aesthetic preference. I meant precisely what I wrote. Language evolves and orthography evolves. We've been capitalizing less and less for centuries now. But (until very recently) it was a universal rule to capitalize the first letters of sentences. I believe this is partly because (again, until very recently) people read in large quantities and, to a fluent reader, sentence capitalization serves an important purpose: it helps the eye recognize where one sentence ends and the next begins. Periods alone can be easy to miss, or confuse for commas, when the eye is moving quickly. Anyway, this is all a very minor point. You have a cool site and I enjoyed your article. I hope you keep writing.
- gffrd 18d ago
  > if anyone has font or other recommendations for style tweaks to make I'd love to hear them! I'll play! My recommendation, in short: pick a new font, make the content pane narrower (around 75 characters per line), and increase line height by 15%. The font you use, Montserrat, has nice details, but they're extremely subtle, and our eye doesn't pick them up at text size.The font uses very pure geometry [1], has really big counters [2], is light in weight, and has no visible stroke contrast [3]. The effect when you look at the screen is that you see big blocks of text, but struggle to register individual characters, and it's hard to find the beginning of the next line. Add the lack of capitalization, and it feels like a monologue, like you're playing rubber-duck for someone. A challenge: everybody uses Google Fonts, and all the good fonts get used so heavily they end up losing their ability to make people feel something. Pick a font that is good [4] and feels comfortable to you. Ideally, buy one. You get what you pay for. And you go from being one of the millions of people who use a certain font to being one of fifteen. If you like the feel of Montserrat, Tiny Grotesk [5] and Decimal [6] would both be great choices and are from excellent type designers. Or browse Matthew Butterick's font recommendations [4]. They're good. You're out $50, but it's yours. If you're absolutely allergic to paying for fonts, DM Sans and Work Sans are Google Fonts, have a similar feel to Montserrat, and solve the above problems. But then you're a robot. A final note: Montserrat is actually a nice headline font. The details come into focus at larger sizes and weights. So I'm going to open a can of worms: you could pick a _contrasting_ body font. Remember PT Serif from the [3] footnote? Try it on for size. ---- [1] By that, I mean things like: an "o" looks like a perfect circle rather than an oblique oval, and forms are strictly on 90º axes. [2] Counters are the apertures of letters, the open center of an "o" being one. [3] This is the contrast in "line" size. Think of it like the width of the line when you write with a chisel-tip marker: some lines end up thinner, some thicker. Look at the "e" on the font PT Serif - the vertical walls of the character are thicker, horizontal thinner. https://fonts.google.com/specimen/PT+Serif?categoryFilters=Serif%3A%2FSerif%2F*%2C%2FSlab%2F* https://fonts.google.com/specimen/PT+Serif?categoryFilters=S... [4] You can't go wrong with anything Matthew Butterick recommends (https://practicaltypography.com/font-recommendations.html https://practicaltypography.com/font-recommendations.html), or from any of the "big" font foundries: Hoefler & Co., Linotype, Monotype, Berthold, URW. If it's a bestseller on myfonts, it's a sure choice: https://www.myfonts.com/collections/best-seller https://www.myfonts.com/collections/best-seller [5] https://tinytype.co/type/tiny-grotesk https://tinytype.co/type/tiny-grotesk [6] https://www.myfonts.com/collections/decimal-font-hoefler-and-co https://www.myfonts.com/collections/decimal-font-hoefler-and...

utopiah 18d ago

Array.from(document.body.querySelectorAll('p,li')).filter(e=>e.innerText).map(e=>e.innerText = e.innerText.split('\. ').map(s=>s[0].toUpperCase() + s.slice(1)).join('. ') ) Not perfect but hope it helps.

utopiah 18d ago
~Gosh, getting downvoted for trying to help a stranger, what is wrong with you people?~ thanks for the upvotes, guess was just a misclick.
pluc 18d ago
Or just blink every time you see a period and hopefully miss the next letter

Lio 18d ago

Yep, I had the same thought. As simple heuristic, text written in all lowercase is often just hot takes and so not worth taking the time to read. LC;DR :P

senordevnyc 18d ago
I have a similar heuristic for short HN comments.

shantnutiwari 18d ago

" the lack of sentence capitalization makes it unnecessarily difficult to read." If it had proper caps etc, people here would accuse it of written using LLMs. You just can't win...

N_Lens 18d ago
> You just can’t win… That’s life )
skinner927 18d ago
You can ask an LLM to write in lowercase.

phist_mcgee 18d ago

I checked their whole site, it's all capitalised this way. It's definitely... unique?

mattacular 18d ago

Counter-point: Doesn't make it hard to read at all, definitely not "egregious" as it's a very common style to find for informal writing all over the internet. Author's own style is certainly refreshing and welcome over LLM slop that dominates most HN posts now.

xdennis 18d ago
> as it's a very common style to find for informal writing all over the internet No it's not. It's common in chats where those people don't bother with punctuation at all, often writing a single sentence over multiple lines. It's not common for blogs or long form content.

_superposition_ 18d ago

Threw me off too. Like why???

danpalmer 18d ago
It's a tech bro thing. Altman does it too, and I've worked with people in the past who do it. I read it as "I'll take literally any conscience for myself no matter how minor, at any cost for you no matter how big".
- mackeye 18d ago
  why take the least charitable possible reading D; i've always read and intended it as inviting informality. i also don't find it harder to read at all (most people don't know some find it harder to read: i didn't)
  - _superposition_ 18d ago
    I didn't take it any particular way besides maybe a hint of informality. Regardless it definitely threw off my reading in an unpleasant way. Anecdata point for the poster maybe. I would read again.
  - danpalmer 17d ago
    I don't read it as informal. Childish or lazy perhaps, at best. When you intend it as "inviting informality", you're implicitly doing this because "formality" is too much effort. The thing is you're not inviting, but rather demanding. You have decided the conversation is informal and low effort, and that's how you'll treat it, without considering the person you're communicating with. This is of course all a lot of strong statements and these things don't matter as much as this sounds. I don't feel _that_ strongly about these things, but the lowercase thing always strikes me as just plain weird, and deconstructing why I feel that way this is where I get to.
- thousand_nights 18d ago
  it's an internet thing. people were typing lowercase on IRC in the 90s.

derpyzza 18d ago

huh i didn't even notice, that's how i write all my blog posts too. it looks nicer to me and i don't have to bother checking for "proper" capitalization if everything's just lowercase anyway. didn't realize people struggled to read text that way though, maybe i should change my writing style if this is a common pain point

krastanov 18d ago
For what is worth, it is incredibly jarring to me as well (I am a middle millennial, not a boomer, and usually not prescriptivist about writing style). My knee-jerk reaction (I know, book by the cover...) is that it is probably not worth reading given that the writer did not think it is worth making it easy to read.
cafebeen 18d ago
I personally find it slower to read text without capitalization. It helps me visually chunk information from different sentences, in the same way that line breaks separate ideas into different paragraphs. Without it, it’s sort of like a wall of text that I have to read more carefully to parse (although a closer reading perhaps isn’t bad).
- dcss_gardener 18d ago
  A lot of the problem here is that the overall typography on this site is not particularly great. Better leading and tracking, narrower columns, bigger font would go a long way. If you do everything else right you can skip sentence cap without sacrificing readability. Not that you necessarily should but it's a vibe if you want it, it suits some voices & documents well.
cavemandaveman 18d ago
To me, it reads like a lazy fifth grader wrote it that just couldn't be bothered to press the shift key.
- emil-lp 18d ago

jaykru 18d ago

Hi! Thanks for the feedback. I've added an orthography toggle for those who prefer a more conventional look. I will add that I'm not very happy with the readability of my site overall at the moment; if anyone has font or other recommendations for style tweaks to make I'd love to hear them!

yshklarov 18d ago
Thanks! To expand a bit: It's clear from the writing that the formatting is an intentional stylistic choice. My point wasn't about aesthetic preference. I meant precisely what I wrote. Language evolves and orthography evolves. We've been capitalizing less and less for centuries now. But (until very recently) it was a universal rule to capitalize the first letters of sentences. I believe this is partly because (again, until very recently) people read in large quantities and, to a fluent reader, sentence capitalization serves an important purpose: it helps the eye recognize where one sentence ends and the next begins. Periods alone can be easy to miss, or confuse for commas, when the eye is moving quickly. Anyway, this is all a very minor point. You have a cool site and I enjoyed your article. I hope you keep writing.
gffrd 18d ago
> if anyone has font or other recommendations for style tweaks to make I'd love to hear them! I'll play! My recommendation, in short: pick a new font, make the content pane narrower (around 75 characters per line), and increase line height by 15%. The font you use, Montserrat, has nice details, but they're extremely subtle, and our eye doesn't pick them up at text size.The font uses very pure geometry [1], has really big counters [2], is light in weight, and has no visible stroke contrast [3]. The effect when you look at the screen is that you see big blocks of text, but struggle to register individual characters, and it's hard to find the beginning of the next line. Add the lack of capitalization, and it feels like a monologue, like you're playing rubber-duck for someone. A challenge: everybody uses Google Fonts, and all the good fonts get used so heavily they end up losing their ability to make people feel something. Pick a font that is good [4] and feels comfortable to you. Ideally, buy one. You get what you pay for. And you go from being one of the millions of people who use a certain font to being one of fifteen. If you like the feel of Montserrat, Tiny Grotesk [5] and Decimal [6] would both be great choices and are from excellent type designers. Or browse Matthew Butterick's font recommendations [4]. They're good. You're out $50, but it's yours. If you're absolutely allergic to paying for fonts, DM Sans and Work Sans are Google Fonts, have a similar feel to Montserrat, and solve the above problems. But then you're a robot. A final note: Montserrat is actually a nice headline font. The details come into focus at larger sizes and weights. So I'm going to open a can of worms: you could pick a _contrasting_ body font. Remember PT Serif from the [3] footnote? Try it on for size. ---- [1] By that, I mean things like: an "o" looks like a perfect circle rather than an oblique oval, and forms are strictly on 90º axes. [2] Counters are the apertures of letters, the open center of an "o" being one. [3] This is the contrast in "line" size. Think of it like the width of the line when you write with a chisel-tip marker: some lines end up thinner, some thicker. Look at the "e" on the font PT Serif - the vertical walls of the character are thicker, horizontal thinner. https://fonts.google.com/specimen/PT+Serif?categoryFilters=Serif%3A%2FSerif%2F*%2C%2FSlab%2F* https://fonts.google.com/specimen/PT+Serif?categoryFilters=S... [4] You can't go wrong with anything Matthew Butterick recommends (https://practicaltypography.com/font-recommendations.html https://practicaltypography.com/font-recommendations.html), or from any of the "big" font foundries: Hoefler & Co., Linotype, Monotype, Berthold, URW. If it's a bestseller on myfonts, it's a sure choice: https://www.myfonts.com/collections/best-seller https://www.myfonts.com/collections/best-seller [5] https://tinytype.co/type/tiny-grotesk https://tinytype.co/type/tiny-grotesk [6] https://www.myfonts.com/collections/decimal-font-hoefler-and-co https://www.myfonts.com/collections/decimal-font-hoefler-and...