I’d like to point out that alot of this started out as email shorthand because of the premium on bandwidth back in the 70s and 80s (i.e. 300 baud modems).
I’d be happy if spelling it ‘alot’ didn’t enter the English language. That one’s the worst IMO.
(Not pickin’ on ya, Hail Ants–it was just a nice opening for me to offer my opinion) 
The only one worse than that is “alright” instead of “all right.”
Hey, my thumb missed the space bar…
Generally when I hand write something I use all caps for legibility, and when I bang out a quick e-mail I use all lower case letters (except for proper names) because it’s a lot easier to do with my shitty typing skills. I have been the recipient of untold scorn for not using capitals in all the right places in my e-mails. I have argued that capitalizing the first letter of every sentence serves no purpose and the practice sould be abandoned. Capitalizing proper names can mark those words as such and often helps with clarity when a name is also a word as with Bob or Frank. However, capitalizing the first letter in a sentence doesn’t help in any way.
For years I thought I was alone in this view. Then I found an author who agreed that the practice made little sense. An author who was know far and wide for his erudition.
Bolding mine. From this source.
Proper spelling and grammar are often necessary for an author to get his/her meaning accross. Capitalizing the first letter of every sentence doesn’t do a damn thing, and according to the linked (and very scholarly) article it is a recent invention. I for one have had about enough it, and can’t think of a good reason to keep doing it. Can you?
Lance Turbo wrote:
People who ask you to use capitalization in posts aren’t doing because they get annoyed that you’re not sticking to some arbitrary standard. They’re doing it because it’s more difficult to read sentences that don’t have capitals separating them. To me, it’s “alot” more difficult.
When I see something like this, the impression I have is that the writer is asking someone to read his post, without even having the tiniest bit of courtesy to hit a little shift key every once in a while to make it more readable. This might not be the case for you, but it’s the impression I’ve always had.
I don’t believe that it is actually harder to read a post that doesn’t have the first letter on every sentence. (Since this is GQ, do you have a cite for that. Ha!) It is probably something you could get used to. As stated in the linked article it is a recent invention, so people must have managed in the past. Also, many other alphabets (or character sets) have no such convention. Possibly all non-latin based character sets are lacking this convention. (Japanese, Chinese, and possibly Hebrew come to mind.) Do you think that all those other cultures have a harder time reading than those using a form of the Latin alphabet?
I think it started because printers wanted to use more of those fancy dancy capital letters to make their books look cool. Now, if I start a sentence without a capital letter I’m disrespectful to my readers. Ain’t that a kick in the crotch?
I agree wholeheartedly!
Um, I’m assuming ‘strunk and white’ is some kind of euphemism for hardcore sex, right?
Get your mind out of the gutter. It’s crowded enough down here! 
Strunk and White is a grammar textbook. Sorry to spoil your fun, but unless you get turned on by the difference between a noun and an adverb, Strunk and White is no substitute for Playboy and Hustler (another duet you might be familiar with).
Certainly capitalizing should make it easier to read sentences. It’s a heck of a lot easier to spot a capital than a period, no? Wouldn’t that make sentences easier to parse? That said, I don’t mind not capitalizing and in most of my e-mails I don’t cap, but I think that honestly it makes it slightly harder to read. Unfortunately, I can’t present y’all with any numbers, just a hypothesis.
But this question of readability is a very subtle one. Sans-serifed lettering is generally more difficult to read than serifed lettering for long periods of time. That’s why in newspapers body text is pretty much always serifed (I can’t think of one newspaper where it’s not.) Sans serifed letterforms are reserved for headlines, captions, credits, etc…shorter blocks of text.
And there are many other conventions like this. Yes, we can learn to read sans serifed writing and uncapitalized blocks of text, but they are (in theory and from my experience, at least) more tiring to read.
If you think prose with the first letter of each sentence capitalized is hard to read, take a shot at typographically correct 18th century literature sometime. They used the same capitalization rules currently in use for titling…except for the whole work at once. Ouch.
Two references from popular, post-modern writers come to mind:
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Neal Stephenson - the Diamond Age: in an age when nano-technology enables personalization of preferences to a degree we can’t comprehend today, the elite class (in the book, the “neo Victorians”)choose NOT to have a perfectly individualized newspaper, but instead want to be part of an inner circle of people who receive a standardized version. The point? Language denotes class, community, acceptance, etc.; in the near term, people use language variations to belong (as we all know from watching from the outside as kids our age used code words to exclude us - bitter? a tad…)
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David Foster Wallace - in Harper’s about a month ago - a great 20-page article on the necessary role of Standard Written English as a disciplined unifier across classes. Is it elitist? Most certainly. Is it necessary? Absolutely, regardless of which community you consider yourself to be a part of. The point? Although in the near term, exclusive language is often used to create community, in the longer term, for language to accomplish another of its primary tasks - to communicate to forward social and other agendas - there must be agreement on standards. These standards are dictated (like it or not) by the ruling class, and by virtue of the whole point to setting standards, they are resistant to change (witness a different set of rules-based English, Legalese). Will newspeak be a lever that breaks up the old rules? For the most part, the newspeak is used for a different, shorter-term community-building purpose, not for the broader, longer-term purpose of Standard Written English…
Writing, speeling, grammar, etc. is not a end in and of itself (generally speaking, creative writing, of course these things can be important). It is a means to the end of communicating an idea. The only judgement to the value of a change in a rule or a spelling convention or whatever is how it affects one’s ability to communicate. l33t5p33k seems to fail this miserably. Words like ‘alot’ and ‘alright’ are perfectly fine. ‘u2’, ‘b4’ are perfectly fine in context.
My .02