Where do people learn to capitalize common nouns, as well as the occasional verb or adjective?
One of the things that I’ve wondered about for years is what causes otherwise thoughtful and intelligent writers to capitalize common nouns. Sometimes it appears to be used for emphasis, like they’re using capitalization in place of bold or italics. Sometimes they seem to capitalize all nouns, as if they were German, although they’re not. Sometimes it’s random, like they begin every few words with a capital letter. I’m not talking about sheer laziness or sloppiness. Usually when someones in a hurry they don’t bother capitalizing anything, like when they’re texting. And I don’t mean the odd typo. No, I’m pretty sure they thought about it and it’s deliberate, because it’s so consistent. I’ve seen some people confidently capitalizing all kinds of weird things for years without ever noticing that what they write looks nothing like the English written in books or newspapers, or even most advertisements. My only theory is that they stopped reading books somewhere at the level of Winnie the P
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