The Case Against Lowercase
Small Letters, Big Pose
Those aren’t freaks. Those are attractive people with heavily vetted idiosyncrasies. Every eccentric fashion choice has been run through a thinktank of NYU undergrads that would blow your hair back. You want to see a freak? Go to Albany.
—Chris Fleming
Above: A portrait of the lowercase writer.
To be online is to stand under a firehose of formats, moods, and micro-genres. Lately, the trend du jour is ditching punctuation and capitalization to look “effortless.”
It reads like confession, but nothing about it is casual.
It’s written sprezzatura: the duck gliding across the pond—calm above, paddling like mad below. It signals “I don’t care” while caring far, far too much. It is the mask of “I don’t give a damn” behind a face with scrunched up with considerable effort.
Worse, it’s grayscale in a polychromatic world. Capitals are color; commas are contour; cadence is light and shadow. Strip them away and you desaturate reality.
What passes for authenticity is often a costume: performative nonchalance curated to look like not trying. Or: cool as cosplay.
Unfortunately for practiced poets and keyboard tourists alike, the line between chic and cringe is a single keystroke wide.
I once read that a sentence has just one job: to usher the reader along to the next. Default lowercase only pockmarks the path with cognitive, visual potholes. It blurs emphasis, slows the eye, and trips the usher.
To be explicitly clear, this isn’t a knock on poetic license; it’s a critique of conformity to the modern media–industrial complex, a tirade against those trying to carve out a stall at the content mill by adopting the house style of fake chill.
Yes, rules can be bent. But breaking them by default is just a cheap, banal branding trick. Lowercase began as a time-saving hack; now it’s emotional fast fashion: cheap, everywhere, and pilling after one wear. The cost is not only grammar, but also coherence, tone, and respect for the reader’s time.
Authenticity doesn’t fear proper nouns or a crisp period. At best, default-lowercase risks clarity. At worst, it betrays laziness and a predisposition to groupthink.
Use lowercase when it means something—poetry, character voice, deliberate constraint. Otherwise, let language breathe in full color.
Mortar matters. After all, a house with cracks cannot stand.
Where do we draw the line between voice and costume?
Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.
If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share on a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on Twitter X.
With sincere gratitude,
Tom
I have noticed this trend creeping up, and yes, it is annoying and quite dumb! Glad to see you put some words to the trend...
Good God, thank you.
Maybe when Gen Z's started saying "no cap," they took it too literally.
To me the main issue is that it calls attention to itself without a clear reason except to distract (or as you say, to perform), and that's not what you want to do as a writer--have your punctuation take the light away from your work.