Why Gen Z Made Capitalization Irrelevant
because lowercase is cooler, ofc.
If you text anyone below the ages of 20-25 or so, chances are, they don’t text like this. They don’t start their sentences with “I” or start a convo by saying “Hello.”
instead, we text like this. we start sentences with “what’s up” and “hey,” and even the dreaded “i” (definitely not following the rules of our elementary and middle school writing teachers — oops, sorry about that).
But why? Why is this a thing, and is it culturally significant? Will this rebellion against capitalization last?
Learning the grammatical rules of the English language has long been a burdensome, dreadful task for any student. I remember being in elementary school and learning to capitalize proper nouns (this still confuses me), titles, and of course, the first word of every sentence.
But on the internet, there’s a completely different set of (unwritten) rules. I first started spending a lot of time online in early middle school — mostly on Instagram, which had just begun to become really popular, in around 2012 and 2013 — and so did a lot of my classmates and friends. And we quickly adapted the all-lowercase style, maybe because it was a much-welcomed escape from the strict grammatical rules we had to follow in writing class, or maybe just…
