lowercase
“gently crumbling and breaking down/slowly wrapping around my neck to choke me/as the person I once was is killed” -reol, “no title”
“oh god, why do you write in all lowercase?” it’s my first copy meeting, and one of the copy staff is reading my article. “this feels wrong…”
i thought about it for a second, and then, with a bright, frosh-y glimmer in my eyes, i smiled.
“because i want to!”
—
grammar reveals more about oneself than one might expect. for example, my boyfriend writes with proper punctuation and capitalization for everything that he writes, which sometimes makes their texts more hilarious than he intends them to be. his intimidating, stern demeanor contrasts his vibrant, tsundere personality1, both of which are reflected within their writing.
some notable examples are2:
“I am not adorable.”
“I will kill you.”
“3-6-5, party girl (I'm bumpin' that).”
“She's so dead…”
“If you become a junkie, I'm breaking up with you.”
in a similar vein of oddness, why do i write my articles in lowercase? especially with a medium like a newspaper, which is typically more professional, it’s a strange stylistic choice. most people would choose to embed their writing quirks in their structure, tone, word choice, prose, or some other facet of the arrangement-of-words-and-thoughts that writing is. most people don’t even think about the typography of their writing besides a simple “ah, this font makes my words feel more special and fancy than i think they are.”
the easiest answer is that writing in all lowercase is aesthetically pleasing to me. it’s cute with this sort of mecha, contemporary, empty feel to it. it’s this surreal experience that feels oh-so-familiar but oh-so-wrong to the point where you can’t do anything but be taken aback by it. writing in lowercase is gentle, like a whisper you utter into a lover’s ear, a breeze upon a flower’s leaf, or someone’s fingers running through your hair.
the slightly more complex answer is that writing in all lowercase compels people—the readers and the writer alike―to read the words on the page more carefully. a piece in all lowercase has no visual start to the beginnings of its sentences, so it’s much harder to skim the text. where does one idea end and another begin? at what point can you blend the words together without muddling messages and significance? when i started writing for the tech (which was also the first time i wrote for myself), i thought about what i wanted out of publishing my pieces. why make my thoughts public, for people to dissect and consume and toss once they’ve gotten what they wanted? my words are delicate and my thoughts are vulnerable, so why should i place them where they can be broken?
writing in lowercase forces people to look for your voice. it means they’re listening to you, and this is all i want.
i spent many years being loud in an attempt to be heard, which is much, much different from being listened to. i tried very hard to get people’s attention by saying absurd things and talking so that the entire room could hear. as long as my voice reached someone, i thought, then i could quiet down. but what i didn’t realize about being loud is that people will end up tuning you out; they’ll start running away while covering their ears because they can’t take the noise anymore.
watching them flee is the most painful part about being loud.
there’s this common trope in modern romance media of “wanting to be wanted,” which sounds all complex and romantic and deep on the surface, but it’s really a miserable prophecy. people aren’t going to know what makes you feel loved nor that you want to be loved in the first place unless you tell them. being listened to is oddly similar to being loved; perhaps it’s because people listening to you means that they know you more, and to be known is to be loved.
in the same way you can’t demand people to love you by complaining how unloved you feel, i realized you can’t force someone to listen to you by yelling about how ignored your words are. so i became more direct with what i wanted. i sent my friends links to my articles, substacks that conveyed feelings that i couldn’t find words for, and tweets that they’d enjoy. i asked them to listen to me when i spoke, and they did just that, and in return, i do the same.
1. if you read this, please don’t kill me for calling you a tsundere…
2. i have actually received all of these texts. i will not provide context for any of them.