I like to keep my blog readable and neat, so I fix typos and grammatical errors in comments. Recently I have had a couple of people leave these long comments in all upper-case, which just rubs me the wrong way. Is there some easy way to fix this?

Dave's Answer:

I know what you mean, and I've been known to go into comments and clean things up to make them more comprehensible and easier to read too. I generally leave spelling errors alone, unless they're really ghastly and prevent others from understand what the writer's trying to say, but I'll add paragraph breaks if it's one long, long paragraph, etc. Just to improve readability.

Recently I had someone leave a comment similar to what your'e talking about, about a 1000 word essay on the departure of their dog. All in upper case. All of it, every letter. Ugh.

To fix it, I remembered that in Microsoft Word for the Mac, there's a "sentence case" transform filter that's available, so that's what I used. I got to the comment on my blog, copied the entire text into the copy / paste buffer, then opened up Microsoft Word and pasted the comment into a new, blank document.

With the text all selected, I then choose Format --> Change Case...

Which gives you a bunch of useful choices:

I choose "Sentence case" (which tries to leave the first letter of each sentence in uppercase but otherwise drops everything else into lowercase.

The comment, which had started out reading like:

"MY BLACK AND WHITE COCKER SPANIEL WAS A BIRTHDAY PRESENT FROM MY THEN BOYFRIEND. HE WAS THE ANSWER TO ALL MY PRAYERS. I HAD RAN A STOP SIGN WHEN I WAS FIFTEEN AND MY MOTHER AND ANOTHER MAN HAD PASSED AWAY. "

was quickly transformed into

"My black and white cocker spaniel was a birthday present from my then boyfriend. He was the answer to all my prayers. I had ran a stop sign when i was fifteen and my mother and another man had passed away...."

It's better, but, truth be told, is a bit overzealous because words like "Thursday" and "I" are also dropped into all lowercase: it doesn't recognize proper nouns or similar.

At this point you can either go through and fix the errors you've introduced, or, if you're lazy, you can just figure that even with a few words not properly capitalized, it's still a zillion times better and more readable than the all upper-case comment was originally.

Whatever you do, when you're ready, select all the text in the Microsoft Word for Mac OS X document, copy it (you can use Edit --> Copy), switch back to your blog editor, select all the text from the original comment and then overwrite it with Edit --> Paste.

Save that, and you've fixed their comment. Nice job!

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About the Author: Dave Taylor has been involved with the Internet since 1980 and is internationally known as an expert on both business and technology issues. Holder of an MSEd and MBA, author of twenty books and founder of four startups, he also runs a strategic marketing company and consults with firms seeking the best approach to working with weblogs and social networks. Dave is an award-winning speaker and frequent guest on radio and podcast programs. AskDaveTaylor.com http://www.intuitive.com/blog/