Capitalizing I

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Tim McGrettencourt. I’m calling from the College of Lake County in Graves Lake, Illinois.

Oh, okay. Is that a community college?

It is a community college.

I teach English composition, the freshman comp class here.

How can we help?

Well, one of my students wrote me an in-class essay recently, and at the end he had this very interesting question.

And he said at the end of the essay that so far he learned that research papers are not as bad as he thought they had to be, but it still didn’t mean he liked them.

And he was not going to start capitalizing his pronoun I until somebody could explain to him a good reason why he should.

And I’ve shared this question with a lot of other people recently, and I get all kinds of responses from anywhere from kids today, you know, they’re texting, they don’t want to follow any of the rules down to, well, you know, in typesetting, we use the capital I’s for this reason and that reason.

So I just wanted to get it from, you know, the horse’s mouth, so to say.

That would be us.

Yeah.

Yeah, so his question is, of course, you know, why do we capitalize the pronoun I?

We don’t capitalize any of the other pronouns.

And he says it feels like he’s aggrandizing himself when, if he puts it, he’s a college student and what the hell does he know?

Were there more that said that?

Yes.

My question is, when did we start capitalizing the I?

Because if I look back at illuminated manuscripts, you have the great big illuminated letter, and then the rest of it would be in, say, lowercase.

And if you go back farther than that, as far as I can tell, it’s all capital.

So could you explain that, please?

Wow, this is a big topic.

There’s a couple things to address here, but just in case we run out of time, I kind of want to get at his point that he feels like he’s aggrandizing himself.

Yeah, that’s really interesting.

This is what’s interesting to me.

We don’t capitalize I in English because the speaker, the one using I, is important.

We don’t.

It’s not about recognizing some kind of special status of the first person pronoun.

It’s not.

I know people think that it is.

It is a convention of written English that we use that capital I.

Otherwise, you might have cases where you, Y-O-U, would be capitalized, or we, W-E, would be capitalized, but any other pronoun.

But it’s strictly a convention.

Now, why it’s a convention is a complicated story without a certain answer.

Some people believe that we capitalize the I because in early manuscripts, before typesetting, it was easier to differentiate that pronoun from other letters.

I mean, you’ve got this letter I kind of hanging out there on the page by itself.

And it’s one of those things, Martha, right?

If you look at the letter I in a sentence for too long, you’re like, why is this here?

Why is this on its own?

Where are its friends?

It needs companions, right?

Right.

Because it belongs to one of the other words on the either side.

Yeah, yeah.

So it’s just a visual thing.

So some people who’ve studied this at length, and I know you’ve probably heard some of these opinions, they believe that maybe it was just done in the beginning to differentiate this.

Now, we’ve been capitalizing this for centuries, 13th, 14th century, maybe even further back.

There was a period there when the lowercase i was used, but it tended to look maybe like versions of the j, when the j became more common and was more commonly written.

So you might capitalize the i just to separate it out.

And it was written like a vertical straight line without any kind of capitals on it and without a dot.

Oh, okay.

So that’s the best theory about why we capitalize the i.

But his larger question about aggrandizing himself, he’s not.

Don’t you think he’s calling more attention to himself by using lowercase i?

It’s sort of like, hi, E.E. Cummings and I are, you know, special.

Here I think some of the people who are saying, oh, the kids today and the texting, I think they have a point.

And I don’t mean to put down texting.

I think it comes in very handy.

But when you are texting a lot, you don’t capitalize.

And so it wouldn’t make sense for him to come from one convention, you know, texting, into the convention of writing for a college paper and say, why?

Why is there this difference here?

It feels strange to me.

But my phone corrects me.

Yeah, mine does too.

If I do a lowercase i.

The thing is, even before texting, this question has come up.

But there’s a question that he asked you that I also want to answer.

Why should he capitalize the letter I in a research paper?

Because that’s the style of that medium.

And if he doesn’t, he deserves marks off.

Seriously, that’s how it’s done.

I mean, you can fight it outside that arena, you know, in office hours or in the student newspaper or over a drink at a restaurant, but you don’t fight it in the paper.

You just do what’s asked for of you in the paper and fight it somewhere else.

Well, it sounds like you’re doing a great job putting old heads on young shoulders there.

I think he came in with an old head, but thank you.

Thank you, Timna.

All right.

Thank you.

Take care.

Thanks a lot.

Bye-bye.

I like that.

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