To ask about capital letters for each word?

[checkingforballoons]

It’s bugged me for years so I’m throwing it out there.
I quite often see people posting things online and starting each word with a capital letter. Tends to be Facebook posts, reviews, that sort of thing. What does it mean? Does it have any meaning? Is it just a strange thing that some people do?! It just be so much effort to type.
Yes, I may be a little bored this afternoon.

No. Idea. I'm. Afraid.

In literature it's a Post Modern thing, Rushdie uses quite frequently (Haroun and the Sea of Stories for example), I quite like it, you know when something's important; A Big Thing. Not so much in rambling, pointless Facebook posts.

The One That Sparked This Post Was A Post About The Price Of Food At Winter Wonderland.

That’s really very tiring.

The only time it’s acceptable is in hashtags, so that they’re easier to read

Perhaps if Susan Boyle’s management team had thought of this the whole Twitter #susanalbumparty debacle might have been avoided

I do enjoy SUS events.

It's a marketing thing. It allegedly gets a better clickthrough rate. Allegedly.

It is weird!

And it takes so much more effort to type a sentence (or paragraph) that has every word starting with upper case letters!

No Idea Why People Do It At All.

I’ve just read a book (Dear Mrs Bird) where the author used it all the time (All The Time!) to show when something was A Big Thing that needed emphasis. It got Very Boring Very Quickly.

I remember about twenty years ago I was recruiting for a PA/secretarial type position and one application was written very much like that. It wasn't even every word though, nor every noun, which would still be irritating, and wrong, but would at least follow some sort of internal logic. It was more random than that, but extremely noticeable and irritating.

I send her the standard 'thank you for your application but we regret you haven't made the shortlist' type response.

She asked for feedback on why she wasn't shortlisted. So I replied that it was mainly due to the random capitalisation in her application. She sent me a tirade of randomly capitalised abuse in return :)

It’s attention seeking twattery.

Hope That Helps.

thecat yes I’ve seen it done randomly too.

Things like:

My Dad went to the Shop to see the Assistant about a refund and he wasn’t very Happy.

Just when you think they’re capitalising all the nouns, one is missed and then an adjective is put in.

I think sometimes it's just what setting peoples phone keyboard/autocomplete is in and they don't know how/can't be arsed to change it? Occasionally miscapitalisation is very much A Thing with younger millenials on Twitter etc though as an ironic/sarcastic/comedy device. I have heard of capital letter words being a marketing thing to be more likely to be picked up by search engines (I think?) but think this applies more to amateur company websites than reviews/Facebook etc.

*Occasional

I've heard before it's sometimes related to dyslexia and that people find it easier to write that way. Not exactly sure how that works though...

It’s annoying as fuck. I have 1 friend in particular that does this

I find my phone does it to me sometimes. V annoying

It drives me up the wall, OP. I recently edited some documents for a colleague (ethnic Greek, from Belgium) that had previously been gone through by another native English-speaking colleague. She commented that native English speakers have different attitudes to capital letters because I had edited out a lot that our other English-speaking colleague had evidently put in. I don't understand why people feel the need to put capital letters at the beginning of words that aren't either proper nouns or the first word of a sentence. I could sort of understand it if their first language were German, where every noun has a capital letter, but this isn't the case for any of them.

Another colleague (French) asked me why nearly all English people use semicolons where they should use colons. I don't know the answer to this, either.

Where I work (university department) I am in a minority of one on this matter. Consequently, I will remove all the random capitals in every document that comes to me and someone else will painstakingly put them back, although not always on the same words.

DH does it randomly because of his dyslexia, it kind of gives away the unseen emphasis in his texts and FB posts. The Crosser he is the Worse it gets.

Title Case However Is An Abomination And I Am Currently Weeding It Out Of A Long Report. Look, here it is with an ampersand for good measure!
1.2.5. Methodology, Software Application & Design Assumptions

My phone occasionally autocorrects words this way. Utterly randomly. It drives me bananas.