Clarification on the use of block capitals

[fats]

Originally Posted by anothercustom

I had a post amended by a moderator (and susequently deleted) because one word in the body text (not the title) was in uppercase. It was in uppercase because I was quoting something word for word and in the source I was quoting, it was written in upper case for effect.

Two possibilities: First, when you're quoting something that someone else has written somewhere, you can put it between [quote] and [/quote] BBcode tags. Alternatively, quoting it in running text, you can edit it to change the capitalized word to italic in lowercase, which preserves the original meaning. Or bold in lowercase for stronger emphasis.

Typists use all-caps for one word not to shout but to emphasize when they don't know that there are better ways available. In straight ASCII text, the accepted way for ages & ages has been to use *asterisks* or _underscores_. Italic should absolutely be used instead in any medium (like a web BBS) that allows it.

This has bugged me for a very long time whenever I've seen it on paper. For instance, Dave Barry used to be one of the worst offenders in that regard. Much as I like him and his writing, I've been annoyed by that repeatedly. It's the sort of obvious mistake that should be caught by an editor and fixed before publication, but in recent years there's no hope of that because the editors at the publishing companies (and of course at the snoozepapers) are all too ignorant to know how to do their jobs. But I digress, as usual.

[kogi]

I find this debate a little strange and can't really see the problem.

Prior posters have suggested several ways to highlight a certain word so why the need to SHOUT it.

Why not use simple quotations like "shout". People can read, can't they?

Though the forum rule could probably need a little editing to allow for acronyms. It was written ages ago and acronyms were probably not considered at all.

Certain titles like S.M.U.T 1 are just that. Writing S.m.u.t 1 would simply be wrong.

[cicciobuki]

Originally Posted by kogi

I find this debate a little strange and can't really see the problem.

Prior posters have suggested several ways to highlight a certain word so why the need to SHOUT it.

Why not use simple quotations like "shout". People can read, can't they?

Though the forum rule could probably need a little editing to allow for acronyms. It was written ages ago and acronyms were probably not considered at all.

Certain titles like S.M.U.T 1 are just that. Writing S.m.u.t 1 would simply be wrong.

I always shout acronyms and no one knows it