[nabla9]

It's not uncommon practice that originates from newspapers.

Writing all low case is way to make sure that everybody understand the writing is just a draft, not ready for printing, or not final or official correspondence.

Editor could not just send it to press without proofreading and editing it.

[gerdesj]

I disagree. It is either simply lazy or (charitable interpretation) ... lazy.

No journo. or professional writer I know would ever forget to hit the shift key for some sort of weird "convenience". It is harder to write all lower case prose. Hit . + and you are primed to hold left shift for the next character with your left or right small finger (pinkie).

We humans mostly have five digits per hand. Even a single finger "poker" will manage to hit shift too, when appropriate.

Many years ago I used to teach a hand written correction markup used on manuscripts. Delta for delete, triple underline for change of case, the correct way to route clause moves etc. You put the change in the body and a symbol in the left margin for each change. To accommodate these changes you use 1.5 or double space inter line in your draft. You might also allow a slightly larger margin but that is generally optional and probably wasteful. The marginal indicator markers can be a bit "loose" - its hand written so an asterisk and a foot note is always an option for really tricky cases. When it gets too bad, the spike is the final home for the piece (or an open fire).

Your experience of journalism is rather different to mine.

[nabla9]

All low caps is faster if you need to write as fast as possible. Think news wire people reporting news like "three shots were fired at president kennedy's motorcade in downdown dallas". The old teletype machines had only one case anyway.

[gerdesj]

I'm 53. Morse and teletype were both well before my time - I did not have to engage with either directly. I recall that a "wire" was sent in all uppercase, with STOP for full stop/period.

My mother used a manual typewriter and then later golf ball etc. I did too. She and I were virtually incapable of not using shift. Smacking physical keys is rather satisfying and you tend to pause first before hitting them. Its a very different discipline to modern word processing. Worrying about case will come very low down the pecking order compared to speling (lol).