A recent study has confirmed what we all suspected – people who end their text messages with full stops are rude and insincere – well, probably.
According to research led by Binghamton University’s Celia Klin and published in the journal, Computers in Human Behavior, text messages ending with a full stop are perceived by those who receive them as being ‘less sincere’.
Quoted in The Independent, the study states that:
The rapid pace of texting mimics face-to-face communication, leading to the question of whether the critical non-verbal aspects of conversation, such as tone, are expressed in computer-mediated communication (CMC).
To carry out their experiment the researchers presented a group of 126 undergraduates with a series of exchanges in the form of either text messages or handwritten notes. These experimental messages consisted of an invitation followed by a brief reply and the results revealed that when the replies were followed by a full stop, the students felt the sender was less sincere than when there was no punctuation used. However, the same wasn’t true of the handwritten notes.
The researchers suggest that (within the text messaging sphere) full stops are no longer the acceptable – let alone correct – way to finish a sentence. According to The Independent, the team have conducted yet-to-be-published follow-up research in which they saw signs that exclamation marks may make your messages seem more sincere than no punctuation at all – unbelievable!!
Ms Klin said:
When speaking, people easily convey social and emotional information with eye gaze, facial expressions, tone of voice, pauses, and so on. People obviously can’t use these mechanisms when they are texting. Texters rely on what they have available to them — emoticons, deliberate misspellings that mimic speech sounds and, according to our data, punctuation.
So there you go, for all you grammar-nazis out there, language is just a fluid expression that keeps on evolving – you’re going to have to get over it, lol
