It’s not about being lazy.
Gen Z has developed many quirks that have come to define the generation. From “work minimalism” to “soft socializing” to their unique slang, they’re redefining their experience in the world.
They’ve also adopted their own views on grammar and punctuation. Many Gen Zers claim that using periods in texts is “aggressive.” The generation has also seemingly done away with capital letters, arguing that it “feels too intense.”
If you’ve ever texted with a Gen Zer, you may notice that they forgo capital letters and keep their typing all lowercase. But why?
Linguist Tom Scott addresses it in a video about Gen Z’s unconventional views on grammar.
Why Gen Z prefers lowercase letters
According to Scott, for Gen Z, it’s deeper than just bucking a long-standing grammar rule. It comes down to their lived experience in the digital age.
“We don’t speak to everyone in our lives in the exact same way,” he explains, noting that with bosses our speech becomes more formal, while with friends and family it becomes more casual. “We change our way of speaking depending on the identity that we’re trying to project.”
He notes that our voices have different registers and intonations, and that different varieties of language—and the way our voices rise and fall in tone to convey meaning—are used in different situations. The same goes for the written word, aka text messages.
In writing, capital letters simply indicate the beginning of a sentence and proper nouns, such as “A man named John traveled to London to see the Queen.”
“While that might make a paragraph easier to read, we don’t flag that at all when we speak,” Scott explains. “So in informal conversations, those that feel like speaking, we don’t need capital letters.”
The digital influence on Gen Z’s lowercase typing
In online communities, capital letters convey something else: tone.
“All-caps became shouting [CAN YOU HEAR ME?]. So lowercase is calm, normal conversation,” says Scott. “Remove the capitalization and you get this sort of aloof, don’t-really-care tone that works well for dead pan humor and irony.”
Scott adds that some people think all-lowercase typing is lazy, but intentionally typing in all lowercase requires changing settings and putting in extra effort to delete capitalized letters that get autocorrected, thus debunking that theory.
All-lowercase is a stylistic effect that Gen Z has adopted and used consistently, which Scott emphasizes means it’s understood within the group.
Gen Z responds
On Reddit, many Gen Zers explained why they prefer typing in all lowercase:
“We don’t type everything in lowercase. We know damn well how formal capitalization works. Can use periods too, thank you very much! The usage of no capitals is mainly a thing in informal contexts, and comes from when autocapitalization didn’t exist; when it was genuinely faster to type without them. It has developed into a social tool – along with rigid punctuation standards – to mark informal speech apart from formal.”
“Because it makes the text messages overly serious. Many of my peers find it rude if you text the way I’m texting now with proper punctuation and capitalization.”
“Because the boomers took the ALL UPPER CASE.”
“i write in lowercase when it comes to keeping things casual but then switch to a more formalized sentence structure in situations where i have to be serious.”
