Capitals
Following this helps:
- people in a hurry – words in capital letters are hard to scan and comprehend
- people who are stressed – if you're anxious you need content that's easy to read
- people who are multi-tasking – capped words are difficult to read
- cognitive impairments – easy to comprehend words and sentences carry less cognitive load
Guidance
Capitalised words are not easy to read for many reasons. We're more used to reading words in lowercase letters, so our brains find lowercase words easier to scan and absorb.
1. Do not capitalise whole words or phrases.
2. Use sentence case in headlines and subheads.
3. Use sentence case for buttons.
4. Proper nouns are an exception.
1. Do not capitalise whole words or phrases.
They are harder to read.
2. Use sentence case in headlines and subheads.
It's easier to scan.
3. Use sentence case for buttons.
It's easier to scan.
4. Proper nouns are an exception.
It's fine to capitalise the following:
- names of people, places and things, including buildings and brands
- specified committee, faculty, department, institute or school: Public Administration Select Committee
- names of groups, directorates and organisations: Affordable Housing Action Group
- titles of specific acts or bills: Human Rights Act (but ‘the act’ or ‘the bill’ at second mention)
- names of specific schemes known to people: Right to Buy
- names of wars: World War 1 and World War 2
- job titles following the person's name
- titles like Mr, Ms, Dr, the Duchess of Cambridge (the duchess at second mention)
- titles of books: ‘Content Design’
- header cells in tables: Yearly budget
Usability evidence
'The science of word recognition', Mike Jacobs, 2003
A to Z style guide UK government website
'How Capital Letters Became Internet Code for Yelling', Alice Robb, The New Republic, 2014
'100 Things You Should Know About People: #19 — It’s a Myth That All Capital Letters Are Inherently Harder to Read', S. Weinschenk, 2009
'Say hello Writing readable content (and why All Caps is so hard to read)', Marty Friedel, 2015
'The science of word recognition', Mike Jacobs, 2017
‘The Effect of Type Size and Case Alternation on Word Identification’, F. Smith, D. Lott and B. Cronnell, The American Journal of Psychology, 1969. Part-locked: free to access online with MyJSTOR account.
‘Case alternation impairs word identification’ Coltheart, M. and Freeman, R. 2013
[More sources under the Discussion tab on old wiki – need migrating.]
See also:
Page design
Headings and titles
Links