Terry Pratchett was a successful author and best known for his Discworld novels. He sold tens of millions of novels in his lifetime. While many factors contributed to his success, one innovation sticks out for its effectiveness. Pratchett developed Death as a character. Instead of speaking as most characters do within quotation marks, Death speaks in all capital letters. Pratchett didn’t invent this, it’s called small caps. In Microsoft Word it’s a font setting you can check that will make all the lowercase letters smaller yet capitalized. This technique is so perfectly employed that Pratchett deftly introduces Death in one novel with a single word.
Death prompts another character with this word providing grammatical help while announcing his arrival. Because I’ve read a few of the other Discworld novels, I received more from this word than one word should normally give. I was reading at a brisk pace and almost missed the small caps. My brain registered what I’d seen a millisecond later, and I laughed aloud. A small joke exists in this part of the text; however, I was laughing because I knew the arrival of Death promised much more.
This technique was so well-known to his readers that when Pratchett died his Twitter account announced the following.
AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER.
Notice that death isn’t mentioned or implied by any of the words. But everyone with basic knowledge of the character Death in Pratchett’s novels knew the significance of this statement.
The small caps provide the 20% of the input that gives at least 80% of the effect. As an example, let’s borrow this technique to see the effect.
Suddenly Death is writing this piece for me and displaying his odd appreciation of food. Now I don’t recommend typing in small caps even a percentage of the time. Instead, take a moment to appreciate the outsized impact of a finely executed technique. For greater appreciation, you could read a Discworld novel showcasing this technique. Mort is a good place to start.