Tutor: Are All Caps Harder to Read?
Asked another way, ARE ALL CAPS HARDER TO READ?
An interesting conversation is unfolding in the Test Prep Tribe Facebook group today about—no surprise—the Enhanced ACT. Specifically, tutors have been sharing thoughts about the seemingly innocuous shift in the classic ACT English from NO CHANGE to No Change. The devil is in the details, right?
In the comment thread, a worthy question has been raised about why the answer choice indicating that the best option is to leave the text as written is bolded in the The Official ACT Prep Guide 2025-2026 but not on the digital exam. No doubt, we’ll learn the answer in time. But I’m more focused on the question that hasn’t been asked: why change NO CHANGE at all?
My theory is that this alteration is intended as one of many QOL improvements on the Enhanced ACT, though I haven’t found any text in the Design Framework for the ACT® Enhancements to support that speculation. But anyone who has prepped students for the ACT has likely encountered that predictable phenomenon where test takers completely overlook important qualifiers like NOT, MOST, or LEAST, presumably because they were capitalized. Are all-caps harder to read?
Some research supports the idea that reading text in all capital letters is generally more difficult than reading text in a mix of lowercase and uppercase letters for a variety of reasons. Content Design London provides clear, cogent reasoning:
Capitalised (sic) words are not easy to read for many reasons. We're more used to reading words in lowercase letters, so our brains find lowercase words easier to scan and absorb.
Following this helps people with:
time pressures: words in all caps are hard to scan and comprehend
stress: if you're anxious you need content that's easy to read
multi-tasking: capped words are difficult to read
cognitive impairments: easy to read text takes less cognitive load
Harvard’s Design for Readability guidelines add that readability is reduced with all caps because all words have a uniform rectangular shape, meaning readers can't identify words by their shape.
Others assert the issue is that uppercase letters take longer to read, while others dispute any evidence suggesting a discernible difference between all-caps and an appropriate mix of upper and lowercase letters.
Nobody, though, has proved or even posited that all-caps are easier to read.
Thus, I’m sticking with the theory that ACT has intentionally eliminated a potential source of test difficulty as part of the overall Enhancement redesign. What do YOU think?
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Design Framework for the ACT® Enhancements
Maybe you can find design guidelines about capitalization.
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