We don't speak to everyone in our lives in the exact same way.
We speak to our bosses, to customers, and to strangers quite formally,
and we speak to our friends and family more casually.
We convey different aspects of ourselves through our speech,
and so we change our way of speaking depending on the identity that we’re trying to project.
We do it, for the most part, unconsciously,
and through history getting it wrong could result in anything from slight awkwardness
to death,
depending on how badly you misjudged your speech and who exactly you were talking to at the time.
What we say and how we say it matters.
But registers aren’t just for spoken language:
they apply to the written word too.
Now, there are people who believe all writing on the internet should follow the same standards
as a business email.
But chatting to a friend is very different to emailing your boss,
and the way we write reflects that.
Our online voice can have a wide variety of "tones”,
and especially for folks who grew up with the internet,
the need to convey tone means that there are fairly well-agreed-upon conventions.
In standard written English, capital letters don’t convey much actual information.
They just show proper nouns and the beginning of sentences.
And while that might make a paragraph easier to read,
we don’t flag those up at all when we speak, it’s not necessary.
So in informal conversations, those that feel like speaking,
we don’t need capital letters.
But that means online communities could use capitals to convey
something else that does appear in conversation: tone.
So all-caps became shouting.
Side note: put that text in a speech bubble and a hand-lettered font
and suddenly it’s not shouting,
it’s just how comic books look. Context matters.
Anyway: if all caps are shouting,
lowercase is calm, normal conversation.
Remove the punctuation and you get this sort of aloof,
don’t-really-care tone that works well for deadpan humor and irony.
Some people think all lowercase is "lazy,"
but it often takes work on the part of those typing.
Most smartphones autocorrect it,
they capitalize proper nouns and the beginning of sentences for you.
Turning that off or, more likely, going back and undoing that capitalization takes effort,
and that shows that it's actually meaningful and not just "lazy." In fact,
the rise of deliberate lowercasing for stylistic effect
coincides with the rise of autocapitalization on smartphones.
And on the other hand,
people will sometimes capitalize the first letter of words For Effect.
That happened way before the internet: Winnie-the-Pooh's author, A. A. Milne,
used that a long, long time ago and fairly often
in a way that seems quite relatable today.
We can repeat characters to convey prosody, rhythm and sound, through text.
We can repeat exclamation marks for more emphasis.
We can use question marks, not for questions?
but for a rising tone? That means we might be unsure about something?
Or that we want to hedge our bets about what we’re suggesting, maybe? And reversing that,
rhetorical questions can be marked by phrasing them as a question,
but not having a question mark,
to show that there is no rising tone.
And then there’s the period, or the full stop in British English. Periods show falling tone.
Which is pronounced at the end of serious sentences.
Which is why so many people perceive the period as a marker of being very serious, or angry.
There’s a difference between "ok" and (breathes) "ok."
Which is fine, when everyone understands that tone.
One of the most extreme examples is on Tumblr,
where commas instead of periods and deliberate misspellings end up with "crytyping," which,
depending on who you talk to,
is either a way to show emotional distress,
or a way to sarcastically show emotional distress.
The conventions change fairly quickly:
now we don’t have to laboriously type out text messages on old keypads,
“cu l8r” doesn’t appear any more.
There is no single “correct” way to write.
There are standards and conventions and registers for different use,
and all the varieties of internet-speak are just other registers.
They’re different, sure, but they are consistent,
and they’re understood by those who use it.
Just maybe don’t crytype to your boss.
If you’ve ever wondered why you get ominous, passive-aggressive,
ellipses at the end of text messages from usually-older people,
that and a lot of other tales of internet typography are in my co-author’s new book.
Gretchen McCulloch's Because Internet is on sale July 23, 2019.
Links are in the description.