13. It’s a Myth That Capital Letters Are Inherently Hard to Read

The current myth is that we as people distinguish words and groups of words by their shapes. Because of this, having all capital letters closely similar to rectangles and similar shapes, they are harder to identify. This is false, with no hard evidence or study to back it up. The main reason there is a myth like the one in the previous slide is how we as people aren’t used to seeing capital letters as often as lowercase. Other things to note about using Capital Letters in text: People usually perceive all capital letters as "shouting" or being aggressive. Try to save uppercase for headlines and titles to help grab the viewer's attention.

                                                                                                      Matrix Morpheus Meme - Imgflip

Our eyes inherently move in quick sputters with small periods of stillness back and forth. These sputters/jumps are called saccades, which move forward the majority of the time but also move backward 10-15% of the time while reading. During this time, a person is essentially blind, but the transitions of saccades to fixations are so fast we don’t notice. We use peripheral vision when we read, and because of this, a saccade can view up to 15 letters, but we do often go back and reread those letters. We only get meaning out of 7-9 of those 15 letters at a time. The moments of stillness are called fixations, they last about 250 milliseconds and are the only real time we can see and focus on the words.

Johnson, A. (2014, Oct 8). Reading, Eye Movement, and the Brain.