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After my dad died, we found the love letters

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Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#41

Post by inglor_cz »

skylurk wrote: post #33
inglor_cz wrote: post #5

I like the storytelling, but the sentences without caps are pretty hard for me to parse. The constant search for the beginning of the next sentence destroys the emotional experience for me; I just can't dive into the text and feel "submerged".

Here's another piece of writing, from a very different author, with lots of capitals. Maybe you like it more? https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42889/hope-is-the-thi...

I like Emily Dickinson, actually.

Poetry works in a different way, though. The lines are short and your eyes won't struggle much with continuity. e.e.cummings eschewed capitalizations as well and his poetry is still easily readable (to me at least).

A larger block of text is harder to parse without capitalizations. This is actually why they developed in the first place. Original Roman writing was very "blocky" and thus much harder to read, see for example this:

https://share.google/EyVZfHb9NgIbtXlAl

It is a short text, but parsing it into individual words is quite a challenge.

Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#44

Post by stavros »

inglor_cz wrote: post #37
stavros wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but if this piece was clearly optimising for something other than efficiency of transmitted information, and that's why it was good.

I feel that this piece was trying to convey some quite profound emotions, and quite successfully so, but the insistence on non-capitalization was just getting in the way of this main effort.

I don't know, personally I enjoyed the general aesthetic the choice created.

Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#45

Post by inglor_cz »

ninalanyon wrote: post #34
inglor_cz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Communication conventions aren't "just" a preference in the sense that they actually lower the friction inherent in any communication. It may be pretty hard to understand other people even if you use the same conventions to write down your thoughts. It becomes harder when the conventions aren't kept: the extra processing necessary has non-zero cost. Imagine Debian maintainers releasing a slightly incompatible TLS lib…

Debian maintainers do a lot of things because of their preferences that have caused many people to criticize them. Do you also criticize Shostakovich because he doesn't write in the style of Beethoven? One could argue that a stylistic choice that slows down the reader is good because it forces the reader to pay closer attention. That is the extra processing has not only a cost but, plausibly, also a benefit.

"Do you also criticize Shostakovich because he doesn't write in the style of Beethoven?"

This is a bit more akin to Shostakovich insisting on using some notes that aren't playable on standard-tuned instruments.

"it forces the reader to pay closer attention"

It definitely forced me to pay closer attention, but not to the actual content of the text, but to the underlying grammatical structure. If the author wanted to bifurcate the reader's attention like this, they succeeded.

Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#46

Post by inglor_cz »

stavros wrote: post #44
inglor_cz wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that this piece was trying to convey some quite profound emotions, and quite successfully so, but the insistence on non-capitalization was just getting in the way of this main effort.

I don't know, personally I enjoyed the general aesthetic the choice created.

Your head might be more efficient than mine in processing text. For me, it felt like a somewhat complicated chore.

Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#48

Post by skylurk »

inglor_cz wrote: post #41
skylurk wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's another piece of writing, from a very different author, with lots of capitals. Maybe you like it more? https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42889/hope-is-the-thi...

I like Emily Dickinson, actually. Poetry works in a different way, though. The lines are short and your eyes won't struggle much with continuity. e.e.cummings eschewed capitalizations as well and his poetry is still easily readable (to me at least). A larger block of text is harder to parse without capitalizations. This is actually why they developed in the first place. Original Roman writing was very "blocky" and th…

Hmm I see your point, though to be fair, that Roman writing is also missing spacing and punctuation.

My guess is the author knows what they are doing and is intentionally reinforcing the disoriented and unsettled feeling. Or, at least, is intentionally making no effort to mitigate it.

(In many other posts, capitalisation rules are followed.)

Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#49

Post by wiether »

pja wrote: post #4

> “He wasted his entire life, my mom said to me, the evening we found the love letters. His entire life, and mine as well.” What a burden of expectations to lay on both yourself & your own family. I’m glad the author was able to put those aside & live her own life more authentically than her father did.

Is the capitalization of the quote your own doing or was it displayed like it for you?

There isn't a single uppercase letter when I open the article, it's impossible to me to read it because it feel like a single sentence and I can't breathe

Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#50

Post by nojs »

zdc1 wrote: post #43
yzydserd wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I just hope they repair their Shift keys soon.

I don't know the age of the author, but interestingly, Gen-Z doesn't seem to use that key

It’s ironic because you have to go to additional effort to turn autocorrect off, which contradicts the “i dont even care” effect they’re going for
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