Except it isn't trivial; it materially damaged the ease with which I could read the essay.
As a long-time English reader, I've internalized the idea that there will be a capital letter at the beginning of a sentence. So when it's lacking, especially when the beginning of a sentence corresponds to a newline as in the beginnings of paragraphs in this essay, my immediate mental response is to assume that I've overshot the sentence's beginning, and immediately to backtrack to find it.
Overriding this behavior takes mental effort which detracts from the ease with which I can read. Making it harder for your readers to consume your ideas is hardly a trivial issue.
(defun capitalize-naggum ()
"Capitalizes text written in Erik Naggum's annoying no-caps style"
(interactive)
(save-excursion
(goto-char (point-min))
(aux-naggum (point))))
(defun aux-naggum (current-point)
"Recursively capitalize the buffer, moving sentence to sentence. Valid punctuation symbols are [.?!]"
(re-search-forward "[a-z]" nil 0 nil)
(if (= current-point (point))
t
(capitalize-word -1)
(re-search-forward "[.!?]")
(aux-naggum (point))))
e. e. cummings might have a thing or two to say about a thing or two regarding the use of capitalization. It can be worthwhile to overlook or adapt to someone's stylistic peccadilloes if the ideas they have are interesting and useful.
Not that I'm casting judgment in regards to that in what either Naggum or cummings wrote! ;-)
> Capitalizing the first word of a sentence can also lose information.
Only if you are using a lousy keyboard layout for your language. I'm a native French speaker, and my layout (Bépo) let me type ÉÈÊÀÆŒ without having to remember any weird combination.
I can't think of significant loss of information besides diacritics.
It's easier to rearrange words in a sentence and join or split sentences in a paragraph if the first word of a sentence is not capitalized.
Capitalizing the first word of a sentence can also lose information.
It's also helpful to identify people who focus on the trivial.