All Caps Madness

I have a confession to make.  I print in all caps.  It's a terrible habit for someone with my academic and professional background to have, not to mention it's a direct violation of the sensible rules of punctuation.  Yet I continue to persist in this style of scribing.  I certainly would never type in all caps for fear of offending the recipient(s) with what could be considered an angry or hostile tone in an email or letter.  However, this concern does not carry over to handwritten missives.  So why the distinction between the two?  And why do I continue to write in all caps knowing that it's incorrect to do so?

The short, simple response is that I just don't have answers.  Stylistically, I guess I'm guilty of attempting to emulate the printing of my late father, who possessed some background in drafting, tirelessly served in an electrical engineering capacity for close to forty years prior to his retirement.  His printing was perfect -- extraordinarily neat, extremely organized, and just plain effortless.  His brother -- a former civil engineer -- possessed nearly identical printing, so either their scribing abilities ran in their family, it's an engineering/drafting thing or perhaps it's a combination of both.  In any event, the reality is that I'm not nearly as blessed in my own printing capabilities, and my all caps style -- though legible -- is not nearly as polished as my father's or uncle's printing.  So why am I bothering?

On rare occasions when I actually do adhere to the traditional rules of style, my printing isn't awful.  It's easy enough to decipher, and is -- to my eye, anyway -- far from chicken scratch.  But it isn't close to copperplate and it seems to lack an identity.  It's not pretty, it isn't messy, but it doesn't seem to stand out much stylistically.  So perhaps the issue is one of handwriting identity.  It's possible that my all caps printing is an attempt to distinguish my handwriting from others.  But it still begs the question as to why I'm continuing to break punctuation's rules of proprietary when, of all people, I should know better. Call me a rebel, if you will.

The handwriting identity issue, however, is an interesting one to ponder and I've now come to realize that there may be a method to my all caps madness after all.  I'm making a statement with my handwriting and I didn't even know it.  But it really is all about personal branding.  It's about conveying messages through handwriting which express care and concern.  When a scribe takes the time to painstakingly print nicely, neatly, and orderly on any given document as opposed to just scribbling in rapid-fire fashion to get whatever message across, it says something about the person behind the print.  Our handwriting is who we are as well as the message we convey, so if we take pride in ourselves, it follows that we should take pride in that which we write by hand. 

I recently went on a job interview for a proofreading position.  It was a rare opportunity as regular, full-time proofreading jobs are few and far between, not to mention that the hiring company was located a very brief car ride away.  During the interview, I submitted to a proofreading test, which usually isn't an issue for me.  The test certainly seemed straightforward enough, but I later learned that my final score, while certainly respectable, could've been even better.  This, in turn, caused me to wonder if perhaps my all caps scribing style had something to do with the scoring.  I know I've been guilty of this sin in the past at my previous proofreading jobs.  After all, what right do I have as a proofreader to indicate that a capitalized letter needs to be converted to a lower-case -- or vice versa -- if my own printing defies the basic rules of the English language?  In such situations, it has to be confusing for the typesetter or graphic artist charged with making corrections to any document I pass along, so going forward, I have vowed to follow the standard rules of spelling, grammar, and punctuation in a professional setting for everyone's sake -- especially my own.  But on my own time, it's all about me and my handwriting brand.