lower case is great for texts because they are short enough to understand without cues as to where sentences begin and end, but once you get past 144 characters the reader has a hard time getting oriented on the wall of words before him or her. i’ve noticed the same thing on message boards where readability is an issue. people use their phones to post. they can’t be bothered with the shift key. if their thumbs won’t reach the key, they don’t use it. the period is still there, but it’s not enough because the english reader is accustomed to a combination of period and capital letter together indicating a new sentence. grammatically the period does the job but the capital letter enhances recognition and it is really just unpleasant to try to make sense of the undifferentiated mass of verbiage on the screen. a lot of ppl have stopped using the enter key, too, and the result is something that looks sort of like a henry james paragraph, he was a famous author whom i’m guessing no one who thinks lower case is cool has ever read, which is why i take the trouble to explain who he is, without the pay-off. i would have put the part about james in parentheses, but you know. and i wouldn’t wouldn’t want him to be confused with james joyce whose final words in ulysses look like one very long sentence but even it yes had capital letters yes but no punctuation so you could yes think of it as a very long text from someone who had not yet quite shaken the habit yes of capitalizing proper nouns if nothing else.

But I digress…