Yeah, the original poster is grossly exaggerating. "Never use periods in instant messaging" is a really strange thing to say. However, it's true that the messages
> sure
and
> sure.
will be interpreted slightly differently from each other.
> I ultimately come to this conclusion. A period is a tiny piece of a message. If something so small makes your message seem in some way negative, then your communication is already on the margin. You should look at other areas of your communication to improve.
You're taking it all the way to an extreme where kids these days must be getting upset over periods in messages and wincing with tender emotions (which was a very popular takeaway when the study hit HN).
But here's an actual quote:
> University researchers examined how including or omitting a period in a one-word text response to an invitation — like “yeah,” “maybe” or “nope” — affected people’s understanding. “We found that if you put a period after those short, one-word responses, the people reading the texts … understand (it) as being more negative, less enthusiastic, than if they had no period,” co-author Celia Klin told Moneyish. “We’ve agreed that putting a period after a one-word response in a text conveys something like abruptness, annoyance, negativity.”
Sounds pretty reasonable to me for SMS/WhatsApp texting, and definitely something I agree with since ending a one-word statement with a period when you otherwise never use periods is clearly a statement no matter how small.
And of course, in typical fashion, word of mouth and the Chinese whispers game have bastardized that into what the above HNer claimed: "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."
I do a significant portion of my communication over IM and SMS, but I have literally never considered or even heard that periods mean anything specific like this.
I find this to be more true when using short phrased, singular thoughts. With shorthand being more common in IMs and texts, a single period may be a misinterpreted that they intend the entire conversation to end, not just one message.
It's something people do in their own minds because experience generally proves out most people only use a period in a single statement message if they're emphasizing firmness. Those who do use the period and don't mean firmness are a minority and are generally demonstrating they aren't accustomed to chatting in text (or potentially have always been talking from a position of authority, so no one's mentioned how they're coming off).
I don't agree that putting a period in casual textual communication is inherently hostile. I also don't agree that those who do are just simply unaware of the chaos they are causing.
At the end, though, you're still making a judgement about someone with very little information and you have a choice not to do that.
> sending more messages before a response signals social awkwardness and desperation.
I just fundamentally disagree. I'll often have text convos where we're both spitballing multiple messages and crossed thoughts all because each individual line is sent separately. Similarly when replying to someone who sent me a long message I will often have a send event per point.
Facebook, for example, has a "shift to send" option which pretty much encapsulates this thinking of each pseudo paragraph will be a separate message and that's fine, normal, it'll only show as one "new" message on my facebook homepage.
Equating voicemail/email to IM is just absurd since they represent longform communication mediums, not shortform ones.
My advice: Take everything people say here with a grain of salt. There are lots of cultures and subcultures around IM, and they do conflict. It also varies with age/generation. You will not get much that is universal.
As an example, I can already see the common advice on not writing "Hi" IMs. Plenty of people at my company complain when people jump right in without these perfunctory messages. Plenty of other people at the same company complain when people do write these messages.
Whatever consensus that forms will be outdated in a few years anyway. The ground constantly shifts.
And don't even get me started on whether to end a sentence with a period!
the article doesn't get the rule quite right. if you're sending a message with more than one sentence in it, a full stop is fine. but on shorter messages, the end-of-sentence is implied by the end of the message, so putting in a full stop on top of that is redundant. it seems like you're putting extra emphasis on the ending part, and the implication is something like: "there will be no further discussion." so it can seem hostile.
and this isn't a gen z thing. it's just how instant messaging has worked forever.
Yep, these kind of articles are nonsense clickbait.
The idea that there’s a special GenZ rule about full stops is bullshit. It’s all just tone and context. If you’re texting someone who evidently likes ending every message with a full stop, you obviously aren’t going to assume every single message is insulting (unless you’re an idiot or very paranoid). If you’re texting with someone who never uses full stops but then they suddenly use one at the end of a message and the message is kind of abrupt (like if it’s refusing a request) then it might feel kind of ‘firm’. This is something any intelligent/sensitive person, at any age, could pick up on, or not. It’s nothing to do with GenZ. It’s been this way since the start of internet messaging. It’s just recently become a dumb meme that fills column inches in newspapers because it creates a confused talking point where boomers etc are supposed to be aghast that they’ve been accidentally offending GenZ people by using full stops. It’s just dumb, dumb, dumb.
>You can get 100 "Welcome!" messages from 100 different people, and they could all have had subtly different tones and intentions, you would never know because it's text.
I realise this wasn't the core point you were conveying, however, I feel like the type if miscommunication you describe is extremely uncommon. More often, people just say "oh I didn't mean that" as a retreat from criticism. Otherwise I agree with you.
> I'm not sure their example of "improved" short-form messaging improves things much
The bad short form message is bad because 1) it's ambiguous and 2) it has a short lifespan. By lifespan, I mean the time that a message can be read and can be useful.
Using terms such as "it" and "she" leave a lot of ambiguity. If you read the message 7 days later, 1 day later, maybe even an hour later, all context of what "it" is and who "her" is could be lost.
Using names instead of "it"/"her" means you can read the message 24 hours later, maybe even a week later and still understand what it was, or at least it gives you more information to figure out what the context was.
In short: I think the improved message is significantly better than the first.
> The terser the better.
In general I agree with this. I have no evidence but I'd bet some people prefer the conversational message over the status update. Again, it depends on the context. If it's a status update, make it a status update. If it's a conversation, let it be one.
You're right and I do try not to do that. But as someone who's used text based communication every day for more than half my life, there's definitely some unconscious bias I've developed towards specific behaviors that I don't think is random. I've talked to plenty of folks who feel the same, and there are a lot of memes out there that support it. At the end of the day, it's up to you as the communicator to try and convey what you really mean, and text is notoriously easy to misunderstand.
I have to agree with the parent that on an intuitive level a single-sentence text message ending in a period conveys something pretty strongly. It does a couple things to me: indicating finality, turning an informal comment into a formalized sentence, and just feeling unnecessary thus prompting analysis. furthermore from a grammar perspective most messages are not proper sentences e.g. "yup" or "on my way". In the end we have to adapt our writing to the context, and texting has much more tonal analysis put on fewer symbols —
> sure
and
> sure.
will be interpreted slightly differently from each other.
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