What Would Owen Meany Do?

As anyone who's read A Prayer for Owen Meany knows, absorbing lots of text in all capital letters can be intense. John Irving was clearly aware of this when he wrote that novel in 1989. Irving used all caps to augment everything spoken or written by Owen Meany, a precocious adolescent whose voice and stature set him apart from everyone else in the book. Could Irving have known that, just a few years later, writing in ALL CAPS would become a major faux pas on this newfangled thing called The Internet? That ALL CAPS would signify the text equivalent of shouting and even brand its purveyors as wingnutty wackos whose very words and ideas were to be ignored altogether? Reading Owen Meany pre- and post-Internet are two very different experiences to be sure, and if you, dear reader, are seeing these words online, I regret to inform you, that it's too late to undergo the former: you've already been corrupted.

Etiquette aside, there are also design considerations that make a case against using all caps. The user experience blog UX Movement explains how contrast is an important factor in presenting blocks of text, not just in size, font and color, but also in s h a p e. Take the word, "shape" and the word "style" each printed in three formats here:

shape          style

Shape          Style

  SHAPE          STYLE

Notice how the word in ALL CAPS stand out from those in lowercase or Title Case, but not from each other. UX Movement's article points out that words consisting of mostly lowercase letters have greater variance in terms of shape because some of the letters possess ascenders (b, d, f, h, i, k, l and t), descenders (g, p, q, and y) or bother (j) that make whole words of similar length more identifiable from each other, whereas words in ALL CAPS tend to form a more uniform, rectangular shape, as in the words SHAPE and STYLE.

But what about readers who have low vision? As a person with low vision, I type in standard English sentence case, but my handwriting is rarely contains any lowercase letters. Instead, I print in all caps as I was taught in drafting and cartooning classes I attended in 8th and 9th grade. My handwriting, at its best, looks like something you'd see in a high-caliber comic book or on an architectural blueprint. I do this because, for me, it's easier to see. Online and in printed publications I would never type in all caps, and I find reading sentences in all caps to be as stressful as when someone is physically shouting at me.

So, what would Owen Meany do had he lived in the Information Age instead of the Cold War Era in which Irving set his book? Would Meany have relented, toned down his voice and conformed to the conventions of etiquette and design dictated by Internet 101? And what does that say about those of us who must occasionally defy these conventions for the sake of accessibility? I'll touch on that in a future post about all caps—STAY TUNED.