Gallery

Poll Responses

The poll gave the ability to respond in long-form at the end, with an option of identifying yourself if you wished. The responses included:

• "Texting with proper punctuation in this generation can have a negative connotation to it. Personally, if someone texts me utilizing grammar rules, if they usually do not, I will assume something is not right, or someone is angry." - Brayden Adams

• "Capitalism without Capitalization is like Crimes that aren’t Devious. What’s the point" - Finn Connelly

• "I think as Gen Z we have a strong tendency to use all caps when we are feeling intense emotions over a digital landscape. Since we spend so much time online we have adapted our lives to it. I believe there are other ways we have done this as well with punctuation and emojis but all capital letters have definitely become a staple in my texting happens that I don’t think will wear off soon. Additionally I am a strong believer in using correct grammar and punctuation while texting so besides my occasional all caps statements and excessive exclamation marks the rest of my texts are grammatically sound, or I at least attempt to make them be." -Gabrielle Plummer 

• "There is a hostage." - Henry Sheridan

• "You lack moral fortitude if you don’t capitalize." - J.B. Wuxim

• "People who text in lowercase are just trying to be different. Going and changing the setting is such a wild thing to do, and people who do it are just looking for attention" - Jack Muething

• "As someone who attends an elite university on the east coast, any lack of capitalization or errors in grammar are met with contempt and scorn. I hate it here, and plan to pull an Irish goodbye, transferring to a state school in Ohio. Contrary to what you might think, New England is nothing like Family Guy. The people here suck. What was this poll about again?" - Jacob Schlessman

• "Whether I capitalize or not really depends on who I’m talking to. For most people I don’t though." - Jake Dougherty

• "If you’re over 18 and have caps off grow up." - Jonah Waltz

• "I used to have auto capitalization turned on on my phone, but I changed it a few years ago. I just like it a bit better, but sometimes if I'm sending an important text then I'll capitalize it." - Jordi Kopp Baldich

• "People who always type in lowercase have to intentionally turn off the auto-caps setting, and therefore are going out of their way to make their sentences different from correct typing convention. Is this a bad thing? Maybe not. I’m not a fan though." - Josh Plumley

• "People need to stop trying to be nonchalant with the lowercase. We’re grown now." - Katharine Barlay (initial)

• "Anecdotally, I’ve noticed more women texting without capitals than men. I can’t think of any guys that did but I can think of a few girls off the top of my head, like my sister and a girlfriend I had a couple years ago. I’ve also noticed that it seems to be way more prevalent among younger people, and that’s probably a lot more of a reliable statistic than the one before. " - Kessler Baker

• "I would say I used both lowercase and upper case texting. It depends on the situation. If I’m texting people older then me I will use upper case, if I’m texting people the same age as me I’ll use lowercase. Even with that it’s situational. If I want to appear more “professional” I’ll type in uppercase but if I’m trying to get a joke across or an emotion I will type in lower case. Another note “I’s” are always uppercase." - Klaire Rocazella (initial)

• "I have automatic capitalizer on" - Liam Delaney

• "No" - Luis Farris

• "i think texting in lowercase makes me cool" - Michael Pennington

• "I love L.A.B. Productions " - Nick Kroger

• "i only use uppercase when i need to be professional " - Piper Blair (initial)

• "Hi Logan" - Ryan Sams

• "I think that going out of your way to turn off auto-capitalization is childish; those who do so try to come off as “different” but more so come off as middle schoolers. It’s even worse if you have auto-capitalization on and you deliberately uncapitalize the start of your texts each individual time. Becoming an adult doesn’t happen when you turn 18, it happens when you begin to capitalize." - Tyler Bush

• "I sometimes use all caps for emphasis" - Will Jenkins

• "Na" - na

• "mario sports mix" - nah im good

• "capitalization is for nerds" - anonymous

• "Honestly depends on the person and context. I have autocap on but there are some situations where lowercase works better to deliver a message or for comedic effect or what have you. Also more likely to use capitalization when texting a boss than a buddy, sibling, etc" - anonymous

• "I LOVE LOVE LOVE Logan Bauer. He is the best young man to grace the blueprint in years. We love LB" - anonymous

• "I text mainly in lowercase so that when I do text in uppercase it is known I have very strong feelings about talked about subject" - anonymous

• "No" - anonymous

• "typing in lowercase makes me feel more relaxed and relatable." - anonymous

• "We must all lay down our lives in the pursuit of the spirit of education" - anonymous

• "You convinced me to capitalize my letters buddy. I like my lowercase with the girlies and to make it seem less formal" - anonymous

Trivia

• The poll was posted on the website in the form of a header for version 24.1.0 on October 15th.

• The article was initially planned to appear in print on Tuesday, October 21st.

• The article was also initially supposed to go over poll responses and data from respondents before being reformatted entirely due to extreme sampling bias. 70 responses were recorded.

• The article was initially named Fool's Gold: Lowercase texting epidemic divides students.