> As far as punctuation, ending periods actually have negative emotion in text vernacular now for younger audiences and should almost never be used in 1-1 messaging.
It seems that people read too much into the intent (imagined or real) in a text message rather than just the content.
As an older user, I perceive messages that use text spelling (e.g. u instead of you or prolly instead of probably) as unprofessional, but I don't let that get in the way of the conversation
> I feel like people complaining about this didn't grow up in the IRC/IM era.
At one time most written language didn't put spaces between words (some still do), and many languages don't write vowels. That's not a good reason for doing the same in your informal English Slack messages.
You can write an informal message and still use punctuation.
> Perhaps people should just read the content of the message and stop worrying about the set-dressing. "They capitalized, they must be a nerd", "she ended that will a full stop, she must be mad!".
Aren't you doing exactly that when you complain how people type their messages?
> This is way too much pedantry and hyper-hyphen-focus. Honestly, I don't care about endashes or emdashes. I've never seen them in business or personal writing, and I probably never will. They add nothing to anyone's communications.
You have definitely seen them. All professional writing outlets, like e.g. the New York Times, use em-dashes, curly quotes, and other “typographic” characters that one is supposed to use in American English.
And newspapers in my own country follow the typographical rules. Even though no one uses it in informal communication on HN or FB. (Well, some on HN do.)
> But don't feel people should be adding faces into the actual content of on topic work messages
Not in the content. But after the content of the whole message to indicate tone? I do that pretty much all the time, as there are generally multiple ways a message can be interpreted.
We can’t do facial expressions on chat, and we don’t have the length of content that comes with email (at least, I’d rather use one emoji than 50 extra words).
> And don't even get me started on trying to text to speak your `mCtx` or whatever
I'm not saying TTS is there (I have no idea) but from an ideal point of view, to have it be equivalent, surely it would read 'm context', which then isn't so bad (maybe m is clear from the ..err.. context).
> Emails have their Pro's & Con's - I prefer them, but not everyone is able to be precise and on-point in written language. Also, you need to be able to express your feelings in written language.
This is exactly the opposite of what professionals do. They should be able to write well. It is not optional, it is an expectation. Feelings should not be part of a technical discussion.
In a few years, we're gonna get emojis in an RFC. Just wait, you!
> why complicate matters further by limiting yourself to perfect sentences and lose out on the extra nuance?
My problem with that, and I'm sympathetic to both situations, but it seems as though the rules of proper grammar have been replaced with new rules that are less expressive than the old rules.
Sure, if the community infers a period as hostile, then clearly, one attempting to avoid seeming hostile would be wise to avoid using periods. However, why is that the case? How did it get there in the first place?
Yes, I know it's been this way for awhile, but the editor in my soul won't allow me to craft broken sentences, even where I know that they'll be more effective at communicating. Yes, I acknowledge that's a problem of mine, but I would argue that the bigger problem is that people are looking for more expressiveness by arbitrarily assigning connotation to things that otherwise bear none, while completely disregarding that there are ways to be more expressive through regular old English.
> but I already sometimes feel this way with text and autocorrect...
Just disable autocorrect. The amount of times where people communicate and a typo is a critical problem is aproximateley 0, you can manually correct them at those times.
I said this as a personal opinion; no idea how widespread that is. Boldface strikes me as a lack of respect for the reader. An adult reader is supposed to read the whole text. If there is non-important information, please omit it.
The idea if writing a short sentence at the beginning summarizing the action to take is sound, however. It is even better if it appears in the subject of the message.
It seems that people read too much into the intent (imagined or real) in a text message rather than just the content.
As an older user, I perceive messages that use text spelling (e.g. u instead of you or prolly instead of probably) as unprofessional, but I don't let that get in the way of the conversation
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