When I was in 1st grade, my teacher gave us an assignment to write something – you know, on those tables with the huge writing lines with the dashed line in the middle so you’d know how big to make your lower-case letters.

Anyway, I asked the teacher if we should use capital letters or not. She said something to the effect of “Either one is fine.” As a 7-year-old, I interpreted her a little too literally, and I wrote things like “I WenT tO ThE paRk.” My grade on that assignment was really low, and the teacher explained that she meant for us to use capital letters all throughout or not at all.

Engineers aren’t much better. What’s even more surprising is that these documents that I’ve read were written by senior engineers who have written numerous documents like these and are very highly paid. The documents I’m talking about have phrases like “Signal Sample Rate” and “Tuned Signal Bandwidth” where they should be “Signal sample rate” and “Tuned signal bandwidth.” These are pretty benign examples – there are far worse ones, but I’m not permitted to reproduce many of them here.

It’s baffling to me; I have no idea why it seems to some engineers that words like “signal” need to be capitalized when they aren’t proper nouns or part of a title or any other category of words or phrases that need to be capitalized. It’s very distracting to read documents like this because instead of focusing on the subject matter, I think about how badly the document was written.

Update: I just realized that I previously wrote a post very much like this one. I’ll leave this as is, but add that the duplication illustrates that I see poorly-written documents on a regular basis. I’d be embarrased if I wrote such a document.