[ARCHIVED] Research Reasons for Avoiding All Caps

[cfelton1]

I have a faculty member who puts all Assignment, Discussion, and Content Page titles in all caps. In terms of netiquette, this is discouraged. I find it personally distracting and more difficult to read (maybe trying to focus on too much at one time??), but I cannot find any adequately cited resources that provide convincing arguments regarding best practice. Can anyone help me out? 

Thanks!!

[laurakgibbs]

purple sans caps 🙂

[kmeeusen]

But SHEBENE , you look so good in purple!

[laurakgibbs]

If you bring it to InstCon,

I will wear it. 🙂

[kona]

With  @kmeeusen ? That I would pay to see! Brings back some funny memories of awilliams having too much fun with the photo booth props last year!

[Bobby2]

Please teleport some of us Aussies over  @kona 

You need witnesses. 

[kona]

I wish! That would be great!!

[bethany_winslow]

I wanted to weigh in on this, because I do think that using caps judiciously can be visually effective. I probably would NOT use all caps for the titles of assignments and pages, but I do think it helps to make text headers distinguishable from other content in a module.

Here's an example:

That's just my two cents.

[laurakgibbs]

I had actually been thinking about the role of titles on Canvas Pages, and not even about Modules, so it was very helpful to have that clarified here.

And it's yet another dilemma: the title in the context of a Canvas Page is playing a different role than the title in the context of the Module listing. I use a lot of Canvas Pages, but Modules not so much, which is why I was thinking about the role of the title on a Page. 

So, when typing a title, I guess we have to remember that it is going to be used for different purposes in different contexts.

Design: it's not easy! 🙂

[kslade]

I found an e-book, that I have access to, called Typography Essentials : 100 Design Principles by Ina Salz (Rockport, 2009) which states at the beginning of Chapter 42 :

Uppercase and lowercase letters (so called because they were kept in separate drawers of the typographer’s “case,” or cabinet) have distinct purposes. Capital letters, as they are also known, speak loudly, while small letters are quieter. Again, everything is relative; very lightweight uppercase letters in a simple sans serif might speak more quietly than a chunky slab serif lowercase. Everything depends on proportion and the mix.

APA (American Psychological Assoc.)
Saltz, I. (2009). Typography Essentials : 100 Design Principles for Working with Type. Beverly, Mass: Rockport Publishers.

I thought this was interesting and may apply.   Keith Slade, SLCC

[cc_armidale]

Somewhere in the depths of my home office, or perhaps in my school one, I have a little book, based on research, that talks about all sorts of aspects of typography. I can't even remember what it's called (something like Communicating, Not Making Pretty Shapes. The author measured the comprehension rates among groups reading all sorts of text types, such as serif versus sans serif, caps versus upper and lower case, white on black versus black on white, and on and on it goes. He concluded, if I remember correctly, that there is a penalty on comprehension of blocks of text written in all caps, which we should best save for small bursts. I'd love to have the book here to be able to supply you with a quote and the figures. If I find it later, I might scan the relevant section and add it as a reply to this post.

Reading through this fascinating thread, I can see good points on both sides. I fall somewhere in the middle. For headlines and BRIEF points of emphasis, caps can be a boon. For anything more than a few words, though, they become more difficult to read and comprehend, and we can lose our readers. I feel it's easier to differentiate between words in upper and lower case, and our letters have been designed that way, with ascenders and descenders and all.

Thanks for an entertaining and informative discussion, everyone. Cheers!

[cc_armidale]

One little tip just popped to mind. When I worked for a book publishing house (all those years ago now), if we did set material in all caps, we used to pop a double-space between all of the words to help alleviate the impression that the words were running together into a "blob" of text.

TITLE OF THE BOOK

TITLE  OF  THE  BOOK

It's not a big thing, but some may find it useful.