Uncapatalising: the lowercase trend

i may be a little late to the party on this one, but particularly at the start of 2025 (and even before then), there was a notable uptick in lower-case only writing across the internet and in print media too. this article attempts to answer the question: what was up with that?

you don’t need me to tell you how language is constantly evolving, but it does feel like a strange direction for the english language to move in – so read on to learn more about the ins and outs of the decapitalisation trend.

tonal shift

articles point towards gen z (born between 1997 and 2012) being the most common users of lowercase only, as they are choosing to remove the harshness of typical typing – and making conversations more relaxed and non-serious. similarly, artists are also exploring the associations of authenticity and personal vulnerability by choosing to title songs or albums in complete lowercase too. 

interestingly, taking into account that this is the generation that grew up alongside technology, this very argument happened already with the rise of text-speak, slang and abbreviation – so this may just be the natural course that language takes as it gets adopted by new generations.

historical uses

there are also historical examples of decapitalisation, specifically in the literature world, with poet e.e. cummings championing modernist, free-form poetry and going so far as to purposely subvert conventional grammar rules, or to put it all scientifical, syntactic deviance. similarly, bell hooks chose to have her name in lowercase so as to amplify the importance of her ideas rather than her identity.

obviously you don’t need me to tell you about the usual rules of capitalisation – that usually proper nouns and the beginning of sentences are capitalised, as well as the personal pronoun ‘I’ – but this well established grammar rule has also been subverted in other ways…

Overuse Of Capatalisation

On the other end of the spectrum, there is also the stylistic choice to Capatalise Every Letter Of A Sentence, particularly done by authors who want to Stress The Importance Of Something, otherwise emphasise, it or poke fun at something. 

So, what’s right?

In brief terms, the nature of language changes over time so there is no true ‘right way’ to use it. You could use a specific set of language conventions only to discover that there’s a similar yet different version used by another author – so use what you want to!