You’ve probably heard that words in uppercase letters are harder to read than those in
mixed case or lowercase. You’ve probably even heard some kind of percentage cited,
such as “between 14 and 20 percent harder.” The story goes that we read by recognizing the shapes of words and groups of words. Words in mixed case or lowercase letters
have unique shapes. Words in all capital letters have the same shape—a rectangle of a
certain size—so, in theory, they’re harder to distinguish
This explanation sounds plausible, but it’s not really accurate. There’s no research showing that the shapes of words help us read more accurately or more quickly. A psycholinguist named James Cattell came up with that idea in 1886. There was some evidence for it then, but more recent work by Kenneth Paap (1984) and Keith Rayner (1998) has revealed that what we’re actually doing when we read is recognizing and anticipating letters. And then, based on the letters, we recognize the word. Let’s look more closely at how we read.
READING ISN’T AS FLUID AS IT SEEMS
When we read, we have the impression that our eyes are moving smoothly across the page, but that’s not what’s actually happening. Our eyes move in quick, sharp jumps, with short periods of stillness in between. The jumps are called saccades (about seven to nine letters at a time) and the moments of stillness are called fixations (about 250 milliseconds long). During the saccades, we can’t see anything—we’re essentially blind—but the movements are so fast that we don’t even realize they’re happening. Our eyes look forward during most of the saccades, but they look backward 10 to 15 percent of the time, rereading letters and words.
SO, IS ALL CAPITALS HARDER TO READ THEN?
We do actually read uppercase letters more slowly, but only because we don’t see them as often. Most of what we read is in mixed case, so we’re used to it. If you practice reading text in all capital letters, you’ll eventually read that text as fast as you read mixed case. This doesn’t mean you should start using capital letters for all your text. Since peole are unused to reading that way, it will slow them down. And these days, text in all caps is perceived as “shouting”
Takeaways
1- People perceive all capitals as shouting, and they’re unused to reading them, so use all uppercase sparingly.
2- Save all capital letters for headlines, and when you need to get someone’s attention, for example, before deleting an important file.
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