Following the rules of English is solely the writer’s responsibility. Some text input methods, such as onscreen keyboards for cell phones, will do capitalization for you. They will sometimes get it wrong, though, so you have to override them, and this is inconvenient enough that people who’re used to using the shift key don’t want autocapitalization. For example, variable names stay in lower-case if they’re at the start of a sentence, and some periods represent abbreviations rather than the ends of sentences.
More to the point, though, proper capitalization, punctuation, spelling and grammar are signals that reveal how fluent a writer is in English, and whether they’ve proofread. Comments that don’t follow the basic rules of English can be dismissed more readily, because writers still struggling with language are usually struggling with concepts too, and a comment that hasn’t been proofread probably hasn’t been checked for logical errors either.
Following the rules of English is solely the writer’s responsibility.
It seems to me you have a moral theory that people should have to work hard, and be punished for failing to conform to convention, even though, if you want to read it a particular way you could solve that in software without bothering me. If it’s a convention here in particular, as I was told, then software support could be added to the website instead of used by individual readers. You’re irrationally objecting to dissident or “lazy” behavior on principle, and you don’t want to solve the problem in a way which is nicer people you think should be forced to change. This is an intolerant and illiberal view.
Your plan of inferring whether I proofread, or whether I am fluent with English, from my use or not of capitalization, is rather flawed. I often proofread and don’t edit capitalization. But you don’t care about that. The important thing to you is the moral issue, not that your semi-factual arguments are false.
Following the rules of English is solely the writer’s responsibility. Some text input methods, such as onscreen keyboards for cell phones, will do capitalization for you. They will sometimes get it wrong, though, so you have to override them, and this is inconvenient enough that people who’re used to using the shift key don’t want autocapitalization. For example, variable names stay in lower-case if they’re at the start of a sentence, and some periods represent abbreviations rather than the ends of sentences.
More to the point, though, proper capitalization, punctuation, spelling and grammar are signals that reveal how fluent a writer is in English, and whether they’ve proofread. Comments that don’t follow the basic rules of English can be dismissed more readily, because writers still struggling with language are usually struggling with concepts too, and a comment that hasn’t been proofread probably hasn’t been checked for logical errors either.
It seems to me you have a moral theory that people should have to work hard, and be punished for failing to conform to convention, even though, if you want to read it a particular way you could solve that in software without bothering me. If it’s a convention here in particular, as I was told, then software support could be added to the website instead of used by individual readers. You’re irrationally objecting to dissident or “lazy” behavior on principle, and you don’t want to solve the problem in a way which is nicer people you think should be forced to change. This is an intolerant and illiberal view.
Your plan of inferring whether I proofread, or whether I am fluent with English, from my use or not of capitalization, is rather flawed. I often proofread and don’t edit capitalization. But you don’t care about that. The important thing to you is the moral issue, not that your semi-factual arguments are false.
I have been trolled. I have lost. I will have a nice day anyways.
I like your attitude, son!