CAP ON, cap off, THE CAPPER!

December 29, 2007 3:24 PM

Is it becoming standard to type business letters in all caps?

I received a letter today from my insurance broker and it is typed in all caps. It was not a form letter, it was a letter pertaining to specifics regarding my policy, a regular business letter. Maybe I'm old school, but it just struck me as amateurish and unprofessional to type a business letter in all caps. Not too long ago I received a letter from a real estate agent also typed in all caps. What is the point of typing in all caps? I am astonished any business would allow such correspondence. Is this becoming common now? It comes off like the person dropped out of 8th grade but perhaps I missed the memo on the ever changing nature of business etiquette. Enlighten me please.

posted by 45moore45 to Grab Bag (30 answers total)

This is the way I think this thought process works:

1. Can't be bothered to type with standard capitalization.
2. All lower-case would look wimpy

I agree it looks unprofessional, but like shorthand abbreviations and a lack of punctuation it seems to become more standard every day.
posted by rhizome at 3:30 PM on December 29, 2007

I've never seen it done...or I've only seen it from individuals who are not in business but suddenly need to write a letter. Go with your first thought on it. And yeah, I do see a lot of formal correspondence.
posted by dilettante at 3:30 PM on December 29, 2007

I've never seen business correspondence in all caps. Except the direct mail ads that are trying to sell something and look like a 1970s era computer print out complete with the tractor feed holes.
posted by birdherder at 3:33 PM on December 29, 2007

Yikes, I hope not. I've never received a business letter in all caps. This is the first time I've heard of this. I completely agree that it sounds unprofessional.

As for businesses allowing this practice, I imagine that the powers that be don't see every letter that goes out. and that if they did, the letter would hopefully get a stern talking-to. It was probably done out of laziness. Or it could be someone who is choosing to deviate from their company's standard templates to stand out from the crowd. (At least they aren't using clipart... they aren't using clipart as well are they?)

You could write them back and say "STOP SHOUTING AT ME!", but I don't know if that would get the point across.

Oh, and by the way, I love your post title. :)
posted by melissa at 3:37 PM on December 29, 2007

THEY WANT TO MAKE SURE THAT YOU REALLY, REALLY READ THEIR LETTER BECAUSE THEY HAVE SOMETHING IMPORTANT TO TELL YOU AND YOU BETTER PAY ATTENTION.

Of course, anyone knowledable about typography will tell you that all caps text decreases readability significantly. Hmm, maybe this is why they write EULAs in all caps.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 3:45 PM on December 29, 2007 [1 favorite]

Were the letters typed or printed from a computer? I ask because my typewriter at work is stuck in all caps mode. But I would never dream of doing anything but the occasional envelope or form on it.
posted by saffry at 4:16 PM on December 29, 2007

Problem is the moron kids that grew up texting are now entering the workforce and they have never been taught how to write properly. Everytime the English teacher tried to fail them for spelling or grammar errors, mommy called and threatened to have said teacher fired/sued/drawn and quartered. So the problem is that we've raised a generation of morons and this is just the beginning.

I'm going to disagree with this. I hardly ever see younger people typing like this; it is usually older people who have never been taught how to use a computer or how to type. Kids are learning how to type at a younger age than ever before.
posted by bigmusic at 4:16 PM on December 29, 2007 [7 favorites]

I don't think it's kids doing this. CAPITALISATION is yelling to them.

This is unacceptable and unprofessional. SOme of my friends type only in small letters, which I don't like, but all caps. UN.BELIEVE.ABLE :-P
posted by gesamtkunstwerk at 4:30 PM on December 29, 2007

Sorry. Pardon my punctuation. :-D
posted by gesamtkunstwerk at 5:11 PM on December 29, 2007

I see this in e-mail occasionally. It usually indicates that the sender is semi-literate. How you feel about having a semi-literate individual handling your insurance needs is something to consider.
posted by SPrintF at 5:13 PM on December 29, 2007

I WRITE BUSINESS LETTERS ALL OF THE TIME, ESPECIALLY WHEN I AM TRYING TO GET MONEY FROM ONE OF THOSE DEADBEATS WHO CALL ME TO CONSULT ON A PROJECT AND THEN CLAIM LUNCH WAS THE MEETING AND THEY PAID FOR LUNCH SO THEY DON'T HAVE TO PAY FOR THE MEETING. THIS IS WHY I HAVE TO WRITE IN CAPITAL LETTERS. NO MORE LUNCH MEETINGS, I AM MEETING BEFORE I GO, BRIAN!
posted by parmanparman at 5:34 PM on December 29, 2007

It's certainly not the standard in my business (okay, maybe there should be quotation marks around 'business,' but the point's the same).
posted by box at 5:34 PM on December 29, 2007

THAT IS WHY YOU WANT TO WRITE IN CAPITAL LETTERS --- SO THAT WHEN YOU MISPLACE A WORD LIKE "MEETING" WHEN IT SHOULD BE "EATING" THAT YOU, THE LETTER WRITER, WILL SEE THE MISTAKE BEFORE THEY HIT THE "POST COMMENT" BUTTON. I AM GOING TO READ WHAT I WRITE BEFORE I POST IT THIS TIME, METAFILTER!
posted by parmanparman at 5:36 PM on December 29, 2007

I agree it's probably older people. Otherwise intelligent people can turn suddenly retarded when faced with a computer if they're not used to it.
posted by dagnyscott at 5:46 PM on December 29, 2007

Very, very unprofessional; embarrassingly so really. I think the "semi-literate" comment up thread describes the author perfectly.
posted by caddis at 5:48 PM on December 29, 2007

I'm a college student not yet into the workforce, but I'm fortunate enough to be surrounded by people of decent intellect.

I'm with sprintf here -- if it's not a sign of less-educated people, it's at least a sign of poor computer literacy. My boss, who's both well-educated and very literate, periodically sends us memos in all caps, with erratic punctuation: she's just learning computers. (I've been the 'computer whiz' ever since I introduced her to copy-and-paste.) Either way, though, it's pretty unprofessional: if I was just learning to use telephones and tended to shout loudly into the earpiece, and mashed the keypad randomly while you were talking, you'd still think I was an unprofessional buffoon.

The other place I see it is in boilerplate legalese, although I'm not really sure why. (I think Foci for Analysis' explanation is most likely.)
posted by fogster at 5:53 PM on December 29, 2007

The only letters in all caps that I've received have been collection notices.
posted by Orrorin at 6:01 PM on December 29, 2007

The other place I see it is in boilerplate legalese, although I'm not really sure why.

There was an ask.mefi question about this here which explains this phenomenon. It's possible that something about the letter meant it had to fulfill the conspicuousness clause mentioned over there, but a whole letter like that? Seems a bit unlikely, or kind of messy at least. Maybe the sender got confused about the rules?
posted by shelleycat at 6:03 PM on December 29, 2007

Only insurance companies and sweepstakes companies do that. It is not standard and is, in my opinion, bad form.
posted by jeffamaphone at 6:20 PM on December 29, 2007

Does the person have a military background? My Marine friend would type in ALL CAPS all the time and claimed that it was some military thing they did either related to the email system they were using or some other practice.

He has been out a few years and has gradually dropped the habit.

Still has the haircut though...
posted by wfrgms at 6:53 PM on December 29, 2007

I see more than a few all caps letters at my job. They are: delusional folks writing query letters (we do not accept illustration, also the person you are addressing hasn't worked here for years, jackass); old people who want to be told that they are still sexually attractive to 18-year-old girls (the caps make their desperation and loneliness palpable); Spanish Prisoner scams (which I am amazed that anyone still uses print for); prisoners, who write incredibly polite letters in all caps; and our deranged and troubling readers who give lengthy treatises on why we should feature more clone girls (seriously).

Aside from the prisoners, I see it as a stylistic choice of the clueless, and that cluelessness extends to their writing. For the prisoners, I imagine there's some sort of retyping or vetting thing that goes on that processes their letters into a standard form.
posted by klangklangston at 7:07 PM on December 29, 2007 [1 favorite]

After reading further comments on this thread, I was reminded that my MIL sent an email back to her son (not my husband) in all caps on Christmas Day earlier this week. I watched her do this, but I didn't have the heart to tell her that this was bad form on the Interwebs. She actually murmured to me/herself "I''m going to send this in capitals". So I guess letters/emails sent in CAPITALS is a way for older folks (my MIL is 70+) or non internet-literate folks to write emails/letters/etc LIKE THEY MEAN IT!

So maybe the letter writer wasn't writing in ALL CAPS to be unprofessional or obnoxious; maybe they just genuinely didn't know better.
posted by melissa at 8:45 PM on December 29, 2007

I used to work in a Doctors' office many years ago and one of my tasks was to open and sort the incoming post. From my experience of this I can tell you that crazy people very often write in all caps and sane people generally don't. If the letter also had lots of exclamation marks and was written in coloured ink, then I would be seriously concerned for the mental health of the sender :-)
posted by alicegoldie at 11:04 PM on December 29, 2007 [1 favorite]

Writing anywhere with either all caps or with no caps pretty well brands you as an idiot or at least lazy. No it is not becoming the norm in business letters.
posted by LarryC at 11:12 PM on December 29, 2007

The other place I see it is in boilerplate legalese, although I'm not really sure why.

Previously
posted by grouse at 11:32 PM on December 29, 2007

Is it becoming standard to type business letters in all caps?

Good Christ, no.
posted by enrevanche at 1:21 AM on December 30, 2007

I work at an insurance company, the only letters we send out in ALL CAPS are ones automated through our stone aged payments banking software which spits out letters with payment instructions and outstanding payments.

Everything we type into there also has to be in caps, no one has really explained to me why, it's something about consistency or something. Occasionally people will be spending half the day entering information into the system and then send me an email, without taking caps off. So I get all email caps, and also when entering clients details into our web based quotation software they decide to keep typing in caps there as well.

If the letter wasn't automatically generated with a few variable entries such as specific items about your policy or business with them, then it's possible that the company has a similar system and the person typing the letter has simply not turned off caps when switching to writing the letter. Sounds strange, but my boss did send me full caps emails about a page long asking me stuff in a semi-aggressive tone, which I took offence too.

The other office staff had to convince me that she wasn't being aggressive she just forgot about capslock.
posted by chrisbucks at 5:49 AM on December 30, 2007

This was from your insurance broker, not an insurance company, so we're talking about a small office. This office ought to have a secretary who knows better than to use ALL CAPS but you never know. Maybe he typed it himself. Not all insurance brokers are college grads, nor computer whizzes. He might be a little behind the curve with his computer keyboard.

I'd ask him directly:
Dear Fred,
Your letter to me was in ALL CAPS and I'm wondering why.
Sincerely,
Maude
posted by exphysicist345 at 5:46 PM on December 30, 2007

klangklangston, where do you work?
posted by lostburner at 7:21 PM on December 30, 2007

At a couple of "men's" magazines. Feel free to memail me (or poke around the posting history) for more, but I don't want to derail.
posted by klangklangston at 3:34 PM on December 31, 2007