Caps work well on let­ter­head and busi­ness cards. Caps are suit­able for head­ings shorter than one line (e.g., “ Table of Au­thor­i­ties”), head­ers, foot­ers, cap­tions, or other la­bels. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use caps. Cap­i­tal­iza­tion ho­mog­e­nizes these shapes, leav­ing a rec­tan­gu­lar contour. Fur­ther­more, cog­ni­tive re­search has sug­gested that the shapes of low­er­case let­ters-some tall (d h k l), some short (a e n s), some de­scend­ing (g y p q)-cre­ate a var­ied vi­sual con­tour that helps our brain rec­og­nize words. Why? We read more low­er­case text, so as a mat­ter of habit, low­er­case is more fa­mil­iar and thus more leg­i­ble. All-caps text-mean­ing text with all the let­ters cap­i­tal­ized-is best used sparingly.Īt stan­dard body text sizes, cap­i­tal let­ters-or sim­ply caps-are harder to read than nor­mal low­er­case text.