lower case, lower class? the capital letter culture wars.

let's talk about it.

If you’re chronically on Substack, you’ll have noticed a heated exchange playing itself out in recent weeks regarding essayists who eschew the use of capital letters at the start of their sentences.

I’d like to think I’m not in the business of proliferating petty drama, but there seems to be no way of addressing the fascinating culture debate masked by these personal exchanges without doing that, so I’ve decided to just discuss it anyway.

I will be directly referring to and tagging the relevant people, not as an invitation for people to bother them or as an endorsement or rejection of their work, but because this discourse was carried out in public, and to ‘vaguepost’ this discussion would only satisfy my own anxieties about being misinterpreted.

The Capital Letter Culture Wars

If you have a life and a job and have thus let the Capital Letter Culture Wars¹ pass you by, that’s understandable - allow me to elaborate the bare bones of the situation.

There is a certain style which has become distinctive of predominantly young women Substack writers, distinguished by writing essays in all lower case as is more common in short-form content like Notes.

I’m no expert, but to me this style conveys a personal, intimate tone, recalling texts with friends where the rules of grammar and syntax bend in favour of your own private linguistic conventions. I tend not to read all the way through essays in all lower case unless the content is extremely compelling, because I’ve not trained my eye to break up the sentences properly without these grammatical conventions, but this form has been used to craft some of the most popular viral essays of late. I will return to the literary theoretical aspects of this style later on in the essay, don’t you worry.

the private language of friendship ft lower case exemplar

One such essay was written by

ayan artan

(culture writer and essayist for Substack newsletter rent free, teen vogue, the i, and other outlets) entitled ‘in defense of pretension.’, which presently has 9.41k likes and 3.56k restacks. The essay addresses a mounting anti-intellectualist cultural sentiment that many, including myself, have observed, which was exemplified in misogynistic attacks directed at Dr Ally Louks (Cantab) when she posted the completion of her PhD thesis on ‘Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose’.²

The veracity of anti-intellectualism claims has been much-debated and isn’t the topic of this essay (though that essay may eventually clutter up your inbox too), but it’s worth noting the charged context of the exchange that follows.

What Counts As Critique?

Discussions on the validity and enjoyableness of the lower case form have been floating around Substack for some time, and this essay by

Inigo Laguda

explores the political implications of seemingly innocuous literary critique in far more depth than I ever could, framed by this Notes exchange with

Grace Yeoh

.

At risk of legitimising the lame pursuit of arguing about things on the internet, this discussion is also framed by a Notes exchange: this one, released by

Courtenay Schembri Gray ★

(writer for Substack newsletter The Maple Moon), which begins with the opener “Lower case essays on this platform are perforating my sanity.” Once again, I would urge readers to avoid taking the personally dramatic aspect as the overarching point of this essay, but it’s necessary to frame the discussion with the actual course of events.

Schembri Gray goes on to accuse “pop-essayists such as Rayne Fisher-Quann, Eliza McLamb, and Julia Hava” as all saying “the same cutesy and occasionally quippy things”, yet nonetheless having “hoards of adoring followers who fawn over how ‘articulate’ they are.”

Schembri Gray’s take on lower case essays

Thus far, this note appears to be an offhand slew of personal opinions that come across as envious of the “undeserved” success of young female writers who tackle topics that people want to read. Granted, this is a note, short-form content intended for a small community of subscribers, so I wouldn’t expect extensive proofreading or in-depth research.

Nevertheless, the first thing to be noted about this comment is that it is unfounded for the majority of writers indicted.

eliza mclamb

has not written an all lower case essay since November 2024,

rayne fisher-quann

has not published in lower case since August 2023, and Julia Hava, as far as I can tell, has either removed her work from Substack or changed her username (please let me know in the comments if this is not the case and I’ll correct). Not that it would matter if they had, but framing an unsubstantiated opinion as critique is risky business in the first place, and becomes riskier still when the requisite research clearly hasn’t taken place.

I don’t believe women writers should be beyond critique because of their gender, but calling their work “cutesy” and “quippy” without concrete examples just reads as misogynistic at worst and jealous at best. artan and Mclamb have responded on their respective pages, and understandably were not thrilled.

Of artan’s article, Schembri Gray writes that she “adopts this same lower-cased, elusive trendiness” and characterises her argument as advocating for a “pretentious attitude”, whilst Schembri Gray believes in “spreading knowledge to the incurious by exuding a genuine passion, rather than Artan’s belief in positioning oneself as someone ‘of culture’.”

If we ignore the “revolutionary man writing with quill” internet tone Schembri Gray has adopted (which, ironically, reads as pretentious), we can tease out discussions that are actually salient: what are people implicitly communicating with the lower case format, and why are people so angry about it?

For the record, I believe critique and even criticism are a valuable part of becoming a better writer, but should offer substantiated examples, display thorough understanding, and use metrics valuable to the author and the audience. Not all lower case compositions dealing with zeitgeisty subjects are praiseworthy, but not all expressions of frustration at a lack of perceivably ‘deserved’ success constitute critique.

On The Lower Case Writing Style

Unseemly dramatic part over, let’s talk writing lower case.

Many authors on Substack who have adopted the lower case writing style point to legendary feminist author bell hooks as inspiration. hooks chose not to capitalise her pen name (chosen to honour her great grandmother), in an effort to draw attention to the substance of her writing rather than herself as an individual author. Whilst she acknowledges her lower case naming convention as “gimmicky” , she drew inspiration from other women at the forefront of the feminist movement in the 60s and 70s, who were also doing it in order to draw attention away from the individual and give credence to the exceptional women that came before them.

Laguda’s essay that I linked earlier covers the detailed aspects of the overlap between linguistic policing and conservatism, and it’s important to remember that no matter how much it may feel like it’s impossible to be successful on Substack using regular grammatical structures, lower case essays are the exception rather than the rule.

I don’t think an opinion adhering to institutional conventions can be considered an “unpopular take.” Positioning it as unpopular masks a common opinion as marginalised.[...] Rejecting lowercase formatting is something the entire historical superstructure of written media supports. - Inigo Laguda

in defence of lower case

One thing that critics of popular lower case writing don’t want to admit is that they feel a sense of entitlement to success based on the fact that they’ve conformed. Many complaints (e.g. this one in my Notes comment section) centre around a feeling of “I’m doing it right and I’m bothering to stick to conventions so I deserve to be more successful than other people who don’t do that.” These commentators love to say “one needs to learn the rules to break them” but, even if this is true, who says lower case writers haven’t done their time?

one of many a charming comment i received on my note promoting this article

The idea that writers who use lower case letters are simply uneducated or lazy falls apart at even the slightest prod - capitalising sentences isn’t such a hard skill to learn, and it’s not as if these writers just skipped the part of school where this was taught. The vast majority of prolific lower case writers I’ve come across on here also regularly publish in literary and popular magazines where they are beholden to the grammatical conventions of the editors, so provably understand them. Also, if these ‘bad’ essays are written by writers who struggle with dyslexia or just haven’t got the hang of capitalisation yet, then why should Substack not be where they practice and find a supportive audience?

Playing around with how words look on a page is a part of the creative pursuit of writing, and many professional writers use Substack as an outlet for practice pieces or creative essays that aren’t suited to popular or academic publication. The argument that conformity somehow indicates a higher level of intellect is patently untrue, and it’s an intellectual responsibility if you’re in the critical space to not tar all nonconformists with the same brush. Also, there’s a question of arrogance - if you truly believe the reason you’re not successful is because you refuse to sell your soul to the zeitgeisty techniques of the internet, test it: get a pseudonym, produce the goods, garner the followers through your lower case pieces, and produce an essay with your findings that will shame us all into silence.

In Defence Of Conformity

On the other hand, there’s a sense in which I get it - it must suck so so badly to feel like you’ve spent years honing your craft, learning the rules, participating in the writing workshops, and reading The ClassicsTM, only to be relentlessly outpaced by essays titled “i sucked joan didion’s left tit under the fig tree” or whatever.³

Unfortunately, if you want to be a professional writer and weren’t born with the requisite money and connections, you will be better served by kissing the ring like the rest of us than by whining on the internet about writers who have figured it out. If you just love to write for the art of it and refuse to change for what’s popular, that’s great, but if that’s genuinely the case then you probably wouldn’t be whining about it so much on the internet.

Would I love it if the bulk of my writing revenue came from personal essays and creative short fiction? Absolutely. Does it mostly come from commercial newsletters, website copy, and trend articles? Definitely. I’m not ashamed of writing as a job, and nor am I ashamed of adjusting my writing to the market, because I’m not a nepo baby and I’m grateful that a creative pursuit bringing me joy pays me anything at all.

There’s something to be said for learning to write what people want, and the chances of you being an undiscovered genius born in the wrong time whose barrier to success is the zeitgeist rather than your skills … are slim. Literary agents frequently say that truly excellent writing skill will wipe out the vast majority of sins in the marketing or query letter department - lack of practice or bad luck is the more likely culprit of your lack of success than young writers who refuse to learn grammar.

The lower case format will not hide an overall bad essay, regardless of whether the subject matter is to your personal taste, in the same way that tight grammar and syntax won’t rescue boring writing. Arguing on the internet over writing is excessively lame in itself, but framing a matter of subjective reading preference as a culture war between young and old, establishment and nonconformist, liberal and traditional, where one side is a marker of ‘true’ literary expertise?

That’s both lame and dangerous, limiting the possibility for literary experimentation based on people’s identification with a certain ‘side’, and giving credence to the idea that ‘no one wants to read good literature any more’ because they don’t restack your rehash of Steinbeck’s East of Eden for the contemporary context. yawn.

1. You can imagine the agonising around how to capitalise this pithy and eminently quotable phrase of mine - I opted to conform out of fear of misstep, as usual.

2. See: https://www.varsity.co.uk/comment/28797

3. Some of these pieces are actually great, though.