ALL CAPS LOWERS COMPREHENSION

If you have something important to say, it might be tempting to PUT IT IN ALL CAPS. Generally speaking, that’s a bad idea.

In Vanessa Van Edwards’ excellent book “Cues“, she said it very simply: “ALL CAPS LOWERS COMPREHENSION”.

It’s one of those things that makes sense to me, but I wanted to see if it was really true. It was difficult to find clear data on it, but things like this post from Mity Digital helped explain why all caps can be so hard to read.

Not only did they explain why all caps can be hard to read, they also explained why Title Case (Where Every Individual Word Is Unnecessarily Capitalized) is also difficult to read.

Their primary explanation is that we read the top half of letters and words more than the bottom half, as shown here:

When you write in ALL CAPS or Title Case, you make the eyes work much harder as they scan along.

Check out Vanessa’s book or Mity’s post for more, but know that typing in all caps is almost always a bad idea.