If you use periods while texting, you may not be a jerk after all, just old
For texters under 30, the punctuation mark has an ‘edge’ that is often lost on older folks, says study author
Simona Weinglass is an investigative reporter at The Times of Israel.
Back in 2004, when Lynne Truss’s “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” was a runaway bestseller, people who were sticklers for grammar, who became extremely upset at a misplaced apostrophe, were considered to be fighting the good fight.
But recently, a news item went viral that suggested how much the times have changed. Binghamton University psychology professor Celia M. Klin in New York found that people who used periods in a specific type of text message were perceived as less sincere than those who used no punctuation.
“Study confirms that ending your texts with a period is terrible,” the Washington Post wrote in a headline.
“Using proper punctuation in texts means you’re probably a jerk,” MTV.com told its audience.
Speaking to the Times of Israel, the study’s lead author Celia M. Klin claims that her research was misunderstood by many reporters.
“First of all, we’re not giving anybody any advice and saying, ‘Don’t use periods in your texts.’ That’s where a lot of people went. What we’re saying is the period carries meaning, that’s all.”
Klin further points out that the study looked at a very specific, constrained scenario.
That scenario involved 126 Binghamton undergraduates who were recruited to read and rank a series of exchanges via text. In each of these, the sender invited the receiver to an activity. For instance, “Dave gave me his extra tickets. Wanna come?”
The receiver’s response was always a one-word positive reply: “Okay,” “Sure,” “Yeah” or “Yup.” In some cases the reply was followed by a period and in some cases it was not. Text messages that ended with a period were rated as less sincere than text messages that did not end with a period. In other words, “yup.” was rated as less sincere than “yup” with no punctuation.
“It wasn’t a huge difference in how sincere they found it to be, but it was a clean finding,” says Klin.
“Yup.” she says, “seemed to be less enthusiastic, less positive. The period seemed to give it an edge of some sort.”
Klin speculated that “because these texts were really informal and chatty, the period was too formal and so it seemed to carry some meaning for some people. My sense is it’s like if you say to someone, ‘How are you?’ and they say, ‘Fine.’ What kind of ‘Fine’ is that? That’s our sense, that it gave it some sort of stiffness.”
Henry Hitchings, author of “The Language Wars: A History of Proper English” told the Times of Israel he doesn’t think Klin’s study is a huge revelation.
“It strikes me as fairly obvious that a text message reading ‘Yup.’ will appear less spontaneous than one that reads ‘Yup’– if it’s interpreted as less spontaneous, it may also be interpreted as less enthusiastic. Furthermore, the moment the period is used at the end of the reply, one may start to think about what other punctuation mark could have been used instead — an exclamation mark being an obvious candidate.”
Hitchings says that for a while now some linguists and journalists have been commenting on the period no longer seeming a wholly neutral punctuation mark, as in a 2013 New Republic article entitled, “The Period is Pissed: When did our plainest punctuation mark become so aggressive?”
So are you a jerk if you use periods?
Does this mean that if you look over past text messages and find that you used a lot of periods, perhaps you have anger issues?
No says Klin, it may simply mean that you are too old for texting to be your “native” language.
Anyone over the age of 28, she muses, “needs to attend a texting for the elderly class.”
For instance, Klin, who describes her age as “50-ish,” was recently speaking to her graduate students about the response “K” as opposed to “Okay.”
“K with a period, they say, is nasty.”
Klin was surprised, as she had never heard such a thing. “But I asked many people who are 18-25. They all agreed to this, that it’s nasty, like saying ‘shut up.’ We’re going to test that one in our lab.”
In fact, says Klin, the idea for her current study emerged from a conversation with an undergraduate.
“I’m a psycholinguist and we usually study more traditional forms of language such as stories or essays, but one of the undergraduate research assistants in my lab said, ‘I wonder if there is something different about the way people understand texts. Even though they’re written, it may be different than reading other kinds of things.’ We started thinking about it and what was really intriguing is that although texting is written — we write it, we read it — it has more of a spoken language feel to it in many ways.”
And this conversational quality may explain the unusual uses of punctuation in text messages. It’s not a matter of “young people these days, it’s all falling apart,” says Klin, paraphrasing those who view this generation’s lax use of punctuation as a symptom of a larger societal decline.
Rather, says Klin, “When we have conversations, a lot of the emotion, tone or attitude is conveyed in non-verbal information like hand gestures, facial expressions and tone of voice.”
Yet if texting is conversational, how do we replace the missing non-verbal cues?
“It seems what people are doing is they’re using what they have –emoticons, punctuation, capital letters — to put in the kinds of meaning that they’re needing.”
This, says Klin, shows that “we’re very clever as language users, texts are a new way of having a conversation and people have developed new kinds of cues. For me, this is an incredible opportunity to watch language change.”
