Instant chats in capital letters are less readable.
Exhibit A: http://www.wmich.edu/wmu/writing/typography.html
Exhibit B: http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/se ... o=ED355497Perhaps the most frequently violated rule of readability involves the use of ALL CAPS (capital letters). (...) Your brain does not recognize words solely on the basis of specific letter combinations, but on the overall shape of the words. In fact, your brain recognizes whole phrases based on letter shape rather than identifying individual letters and words.
Exhibit C: http://uxmovement.com/design-articles/a ... rs-to-read(...) lower-case printing is much more legible than all-capital printing due to the fact that lower-case letters have more character in terms of variation in shape and the contrasting of ascenders and desenders with short letters. (...) Thus words formed from lower case letters have unique outline patters, and familiar words can be read as a whole, while all-capital letters have no distinctive patter and slow down readers.
So yeah, DEFENSE DOWN! is worse than defense down!.Text in all caps greatly reduces the shape contrast for each word. In fact, the shape of any word put in all caps for all fonts, either sans-serif or serif, is a rectangle. This means that the words in all caps have only one parallel edge at the top and bottom of each word, giving it no shape contrast. However, words put in title style capitalization often have a shape of multiple adjacent edges at the top and bottom, giving it high shape contrast.
That is all.
