> if you can't even be bothered to capitalize the first letter of each sentence in your publication
I suspect this is actually more interesting than base sloppiness.
My first experience with instant messaging was on ICQ (and IRC a year or two later once my Internet usage wasn’t being billed by the minute), and to this day I don’t capitalize or end single-sentence replies with a period in IM situations. The no-period thing is mostly universal—I believe I’ve seen an article in a linguistics journal about how a final period “feels aggressive”—, but I’ve noticed people who learned on smartphones using keyboards with automatic capitalization do, which just looks unnatural to me.
So if someone writes a blog post not as an article, but as a monologue in this kind of conversational style, I can see how they could come to not capitalize and use newlines as sentence breaks. I believe that style is (was?) somewhat popular on Tumblr? I’m honestly a bit surprised it wasn’t more popular on Twitter before the 140-character was lifted.
I’ve heard that communication over IM is actually linguistically interesting (the whole thing, of course, not the punctuation)—in most ways it works like a spoken (or signed) conversation, except it’s expressed in writing. So it’s not entirely unexpected that it can develop conventions that are unlike that of the normal written word. And despite the thousands of years people have been using writing, there isn’t really precedent for this kind of thing before computers.
(I’m also not convinced anything good comes out of trying to attract a generically wider audience.)
I suspect this is actually more interesting than base sloppiness.
My first experience with instant messaging was on ICQ (and IRC a year or two later once my Internet usage wasn’t being billed by the minute), and to this day I don’t capitalize or end single-sentence replies with a period in IM situations. The no-period thing is mostly universal—I believe I’ve seen an article in a linguistics journal about how a final period “feels aggressive”—, but I’ve noticed people who learned on smartphones using keyboards with automatic capitalization do, which just looks unnatural to me.
So if someone writes a blog post not as an article, but as a monologue in this kind of conversational style, I can see how they could come to not capitalize and use newlines as sentence breaks. I believe that style is (was?) somewhat popular on Tumblr? I’m honestly a bit surprised it wasn’t more popular on Twitter before the 140-character was lifted.
I’ve heard that communication over IM is actually linguistically interesting (the whole thing, of course, not the punctuation)—in most ways it works like a spoken (or signed) conversation, except it’s expressed in writing. So it’s not entirely unexpected that it can develop conventions that are unlike that of the normal written word. And despite the thousands of years people have been using writing, there isn’t really precedent for this kind of thing before computers.
(I’m also not convinced anything good comes out of trying to attract a generically wider audience.)