Capitalization Isn't Corporate

I received a cold pitch email this weekend that actually piqued my interest.

The sender had a useful point: their company offers scraping APIs in addition to proxies, including options for Amazon and Google.

Unfortunately, the point arrived like this:

"we also do scraping APIs, not just proxies, amazon + google included"

Elsewhere, I got a "btw" and two separate instances of "ofc," including "depends on the setup ofc."

The entire email was lowercase.

Unpopular opinion: Capitalization isn't corporate. It's just capitalization.

I understand what we're all trying to do. Nobody wants their writing to sound like it came straight out of ChatGPT. We've become familiar with the inflated language, the excessive em dashes, the dramatic one-line paragraphs, and the relentless insistence that everything is a game changer.

But somewhere along the way, we've apparently decided the antidote is to write professional emails like we're texting a friend from the grocery store.

No capital letters. No complete sentences. An "ofc" for good measure.

I'm not opposed to casual writing. I'm opposed to casualness that feels like a deliberate attempt to prove there's a human on the other end.

And I have no idea whether a human or an AI agent wrote this particular email. That's what makes the whole thing so funny. We're developing an entirely new set of writing conventions to avoid sounding AI-generated, and those conventions are becoming just as recognizable as the ones we're trying to escape.

Meanwhile, the sender had already done something many cold emails fail to do: give me a reason to pay attention.

They told me something specific about their product that I didn't know. It was relevant. It was useful.

That was the good part.

The lowercase letters didn't make it more personal. The "ofc"s didn't make the offer more compelling. They just made me wonder why a perfectly reasonable sales pitch was disguised as a text from my teenage son. 

The race to sound human is getting ridiculous.

Say something worth reading. Capitalize Amazon. We'll be fine.