If you’ve ever had a text message go over not quite as expected — or worse, blow up in your face — there’s a chance your punctuation played a role.
New research has found that ending text sentences with a period can cause the message to be perceived as insincere.
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A study out of Binghamton University had participants read different text exchanges, some with periods at the end of responses, and some without. The participants also read handwritten notes with and without punctuation.
“Texting is lacking many of the social cues used in actual face-to-face conversations. When speaking, people easily convey social and emotional information with eye gaze, facial expressions, tone of voice, pauses, and so on,” lead researcher Celia Klin said.
“People obviously can’t use these mechanisms when they are texting.”
Love it or hate it, texting and digital communication is a part of everyday life. It has produced acronyms (BRB, LOL, IKR) and a huge selection of emojis and other icons to convey thoughts and feelings, which Klin said have become useful tools.
“It makes sense that texters rely on what they have available to them — emoticons, deliberate misspellings that mimic speech sounds and, according to our data, punctuation.”
Researchers concluded that punctuation can “convey pragmatic and social information.”
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However, follow-up research by the same team on the exclamation mark showed opposite results: messages were interpreted as more sincere.
“Given that people are wonderfully adept at communicating complex and nuanced information in conversations, it’s not surprising that as texting evolves, people are finding ways to convey the same types of information in their texts,” Klin said.
The study was published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior.
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