my character speaks in lowercase

What kind of an impression does speaking in all lowercase letters give about a character? Is it too annoying and gimmicky or would it actually be an useful way of providing instant characterisation and later highlighting situations where they switch to normal?

It gives the impression that the author is trying too hard.

Depends on the medium. In a comic book or manga, it might work, but I don't see it working in all text, where it'll just pull the reader out of the story.

That's the kind of thing I imagine working better in a more visual medium.

It could work, but the impression they take from the lowercase would depend on other aspects of the character and you'd be turning a lot of people off.

EDIT: Lots of ninja out tonight.

edited 8th Apr '11 9:54:20 PM by Durazno

Basically: in a prose story, a character cannot speak in all lowercase. It's an affectation of the writer and/or the fictional narrator, and is very unlikely to have a positive response in the reader.

To put it bluntly, I would likely put such a story down and never read any more of it.

Terry Pratchett could probably do this and get away with it, so it's not impossible to work, but really, it's like trying to swim with 50-pound weights tied to your ankles.

It works much better if a character speaks in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS.

edited 9th Apr '11 1:08:56 AM by alliterator

Yes, it does, because all-caps has a long history as headline case and thus interpreted as louder. All-lower-case is only associated with e.e. cummings, pretentious fucks who want to be e.e. cummings, and texting kiddies.

And among certain circles, totheark expies/rip-offs.

edited 9th Apr '11 1:51:25 AM by DJay32

Ok, so it looks like an annoying gimmick. Good to know.

In manga/comics and such yeah it is workable. Mainly in the fact that all lowercase letters in visual media like that comes across voiced as a flat deadpan monotone among other variations.

Literature-wise, I'm not sure even Terry Pratchett can make it work.

Well, one can always just go for minimal punctuation rather than overt all-lowercase.

A thought—what if you never used quotation marks for that character? Not in a way that would break any grammar, but...for example, the book Ragtime has a lot of dialog but no quotation marks.

Bob said he was going to the store. "Why are you going to the store?" asked Alice. Bob replied that he was running low on cabbage, and he left.

Just a speech oddity that I wouldn't find annoying or gimmicky.

Wish I could remember the name of the novel, but there was one that got away with things like this. It did it by having almost no punctuation, using titles for characters "The man with the burnt hands" or "The girl with the red shoes" rather than names or descriptions, being told in non-chronological order, and having bizarre formatting as to paragraphs etc, to make them appear like stanzas of a poem, rather than standard prose.

I think that the message I'm trying to get across is that it can work if everything is done in a non-standard fashion, but that if it's the only thing that is, then it will stand out as a glaring problem.