I learnt some interesting stuff about letter cases and reading. A study indicated that the average adult reads at the level of a 10 year-old. When I first saw this I rather assumed that this was biased towards people with reading challenges, those of a foreign language etc. But it actually includes academics, politicians, doctors(!) and other highly educated and supposedly skilled readers. It turns out that this is because we scan words rather than actually read them letter-by-letter.
When we are first learning to read, we recognize and spell out each letter to establish the word in print. As we get older, we recognize the combinations of letters that form words by their various up and down strokes, and curves, and it is at this level we read as adults.
However if we see word written in ALL CAPS, that method of scanning fails, and we are forced back into a slower reading mode again. This is used in the printing industry for headlines and other short phrases were we want to slow the reader down and create emphasis - it's apparently known as shrieking in the publishing world.
However, if large bodies of text are in all-caps, then we revert to scanning again, but our comprehension level drops by at least one year, often two. This was a problem in early IT systems that had simplified alphabets and everything was typed in caps - I worked with such a system for logging and recording resolutions to system faults and failures, and it was quite tiring to have to deal with en masse.
cheers, TREVOR
The mark of good photographer is less what they hold in their hand, it's more what they hold in their head;
"All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow", Leo Tolstoy;
"Skill in photography is acquired by practice and not by purchase" Percy W. Harris
