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  • This study show that all caps is not harder to read than lowercase.

Engineers and architects often write in all caps. Does this increase the legibility and visual impact of text?

user707264
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    All caps forces a lot of people to write each letter individually instead of making them connected which often becomes a squiggly line due to trying to write fast. I dated a med student once, her hand writing was nearly unreadable seeing it become just a line with a loop here and there when she was working. – A.bakker Jan 30 '23 at 09:05
  • Totally anecdotal, but perhaps relevant: as a child, my writing was completely illegible until grade 6, when I got a teacher who wrote in all caps and I realized I could just start doing that too. My writing is still mostly illegible, but it's less so when I'm writing in all caps. – Spitemaster Jan 30 '23 at 23:29
  • Don't forget that there are cultural differences. While it's much more usual in the US to not use cursive (especially lately), it's rather uncommon in Europe, for instance, where cursive is still completely natural. Although this is anecdotal, of course. I've yet to see a single human writing routinely in all caps (I don't doubt they exist, just that among the many I met, there wasn't a single one I noticed). – Gábor Jan 31 '23 at 00:52
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    Note that the linked article is (implicitly) about typed, not handwritten, text – Chris H Jan 31 '23 at 10:10
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    The linked article actually says that it's faster to read lowercase than uppercase. It just tries to make a point that all caps could be as easy to read, if we were as used to them. "All capital (uppercase) letters are slower for people to read, but only because they aren’t used to them. Mixed case text is only faster to read than uppercase letters because of practice." – Stef Jan 31 '23 at 11:44
  • What contexts are you suggesting engineers commonly use ALL-CAPS in? Like are we talking short labels, or on longer typed things? – Nat Jan 31 '23 at 12:18
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    The article you're referring to is not a "study", it's a blog. A blog by someone with a fairly-relevant PhD, but a blog nonetheless. And, as the article states, the research "doesn’t exist, or 'It’s complicated'". I don't see the justification for concluding "[all caps is] slower for people to read, but only because they aren’t used to them". I see nothing there that supports not being used to them being the "only" reason why they're slower to read, but rather just that we may have some misconceptions about what the reasons are. – NotThatGuy Jan 31 '23 at 14:37
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    @Nat Technical lettering, like blueprints or labels on parts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_lettering https://bleckarchitects.com/want-write-like-architect-architectural-lettering/ This is probably more common with hand lettering than with typewritten stuff. – user3067860 Jan 31 '23 at 20:18
  • @A.bakker Whether letters are written individually is (mostly) orthogonal to choice of case, because it's entirely possible to write lower case letters without joining them up. That's often called ‘printing’, and IME it makes handwriting much more legible — especially at speed — with no significant speed penalty. (I haven't used joined-up since I was 20, after much experimentation.) – gidds Feb 01 '23 at 15:34
  • @user3067860 when I started my engineering career, there were still draughtsmen who worked by hand. Their technical lettering was mixed case. Even freehand technical lettering isn't really handwriting in the conventional sense (and in some ways is closer to typed text). Where I'm most likely to see all caps in a similar context is in engineering sketches, where neither the lettering nor the drawing is formal, but clarity is important - and actual technical lettering skills are dying out along with those who used them. In such sketches it's not uncommon for the lettering to be very small. – Chris H Feb 02 '23 at 11:28
  • The claim that "Mixed case text is only faster to read than uppercase letters because of practice" is likely falsifiable by research undertaken during the design of modern road signs. Signs are generally mixed-case for fast recognition of word outlines that's not possible in all-caps writing (where every word is rectangular). In the UK, we left all-caps behind on destination signs in the 1960s (motorways) and 1970s (all-purpose roads), and the same is likely true in other countries that once used all-caps. – Toby Speight Feb 02 '23 at 14:14
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    @ChrisH I think this is pretty common knowledge to anyone who's done hand-drawn technical diagrams--even the Wikipedia article mentions "lower case letters are rare". – user3067860 Feb 02 '23 at 15:33
  • @user3067860 I suspect both you and the Wikipedia author are in the US, as mixed case is more common in old engineering drawings on the metric side of the Atlantic – Chris H Feb 02 '23 at 15:35

2 Answers2

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You are misrepresenting the claim. From your link [emphasis mine]:

All capital (uppercase) letters are slower for people to read, but only because they aren’t used to them.

Even if the idea that word shape doesn't explain the empirical results, that doesn't make those empirical results incorrect. In normal circumstances, people read mixed-case faster. I see nothing in the article contradicting that. It. The key word that you've omitted is 'inherently'.

In other words: mixed-case is easier to read in practice but not in theory.

One of the articles referenced does assert at least one advantage of ALL-CAPS [emphasis mine]:

is the result that upper-case text is more legible in terms of reading speed, for readers with reduced acuity due to visual impairment, and in normally-sighted readers when text is visually small.

JimmyJames
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  • I dont look at words like shapes, I look it as set of letters, the clearer each letter is, the easier it is to read the word. I read all caps and lowercase with same speed, but cursive I read much slower. – user707264 Jan 31 '23 at 08:56
  • @user207141 OK. But saying people don't read words as shapes is not the same thing as saying people don't read mixed-case faster. They do read it faster (in general) and the article explicitly states that is the case. – JimmyJames Jan 31 '23 at 16:10
  • You think cursive is hard to read only because we are not used to them? I think they are hard to read because clarity of each letter is poor. – user707264 Feb 01 '23 at 19:13
  • @user207141 I didn't mention anything about cursive. – JimmyJames Feb 01 '23 at 19:47
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When you are writing in a hurry, taking notes during a lecture or presentation, we take several short cuts.

Engineers, at least, attend "lectures" of some sort or another about every other working day. It is not an unusual week to have 5 or 6 coordinating meetings with fellow engineers on the same project and/or management supervising the project and/or end-users of the project, all of which may require notes.

I've worked with software and firmware engineers, electronic engineers and mechanical engineers.

All Caps increases clarity; there are a limited number of shapes to recognize when those are written in a hurry so the guessing game later (going over your notes) has fewer choices; and if case actually matters (as it might for some technical purposes) you can just make the capped letters large and the lower case letters small.

It is also common to abbreviate words (abrvt wds). Cursive script is "fast" but often becomes illegible in a hurry, Caps less so.

It is not unusual at all in meetings to see everybody, including the manager or presenter, with some sort of notebook or paper they can take notes on.

When your job is inventing new products, your entire career is basically a learning environment and every meeting is like a class you are taking or a class you are teaching. Bring a notebook.

Amadeus
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    Indeed my handwriting gets pretty bad at speed, to the point where I have to think about some words. Writing all caps is slower, so all caps for key or unexpected words can add clarity and emphasis (and emphasising the unexpected is fairly likely) at the same time. A non-emphasised clearly spelt word can be achieved by slowing down, of course. – Chris H Jan 31 '23 at 10:13
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    @ChrisH My handwriting, too, used to get illegible at speed. After a lot of experimentation, I found that printing (i.e. writing letters separately, but still using lower case) improved that tremendously — and with only minimal speed penalty. Printing is more legible to start with (else why did books never develop joined-up print?), but IME it degrades far less with speed than joined-up. I don't know why joined-up has such cachet — or is even taught at all! – gidds Feb 01 '23 at 15:38
  • @gidds the problem I find with lower case is it is harder to distinguish "i" from "l" (lower case L) from "1". I also always write zero with a slash. even "g" and "q". But to each his own. – Amadeus Feb 02 '23 at 00:03
  • @Amadeus I add a litte ‘hook’ to the top of ‘1’ (like most fonts), which distinguishes it very well. And of course ‘i’ has a dot. I don't generally have trouble mixing up upper-case ‘I’ from lower-case ‘l’, but if there's any risk I add serifs (short horizontal lines at the top and bottom) to the ‘I’, or a short curved tail to the ‘l’. The more distinct your letter shapes, the easier they'll be to distinguish, especially at speed. (I found greatest legibility with shapes similar to the font Century Gothic, especially the relatively large, round bodies and small ascenders/descenders.) – gidds Feb 02 '23 at 08:52