The message beyond the HN title actually has potential. However, the author focuses in some odd places for me.
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. Exclamation points, commas, and question marks, great!
For abbreviations, it's simply know your audience. You should use them when everyone in the room knows them, but you have to think about that first before use. The step of thinking about it is a great mental step to add, but the article presents it more as a steadfast rule. Also, expanding them in parentheses can be a chance to educate your audience for the future even when you have people who don't know, like I'll do below :P
To me, the smallest point was actually the most interesting and valuable, and it was skated over entirely - communicating emotion and sentiment, particularly through emoji use. With WFH (Work From Home) especially, communicating emotion is very socially helpful. I've found a lot of engineers think "well I don't care/need so I'll skip the flowery additions for efficiency" and then leave many non-tech people and some engineering coworkers to decipher if this random slack ask is mad, passive aggressive, inquisitive, or a check-in. This has far worse effects longterm often than an unknown acronym.
Adding emojis can solve this, or if you don't like those, literally giving more social context in words can also do the trick. When we're talking in person, we always communicate emotion, even when it's not the primary purpose. I think many would do well to include that in their online messaging as well :)
I guess that is how I know I am getting old? I have never even heard of anyone thinking a sentence ending in a period is anything but normal. And I actually detest the use of exclamation points. They are almost always unnecessary. And I probably read too much into them, as opposed to others doing the same on periods.
It is interesting though. Looking back at chat history. If I am not writing multiple sentences, and even sometimes when I am, I tend to leave off the last period.
I think emoji reactions to messages, especially in off topic channels, are totally reasonable. And certain ones (+1, -1, 100, etc.) are OK for technical discussions. But don't feel people should be adding faces into the actual content of on topic work messages. But, the actual context in those conversations should be clear, and make them unnecessary.
One thing that actually drives me nuts is when people will keep their messages short. Write 5-10 words of a thought out, hit enter, and keep on going. You end up getting 7 notifications in quick succession, and none of it is complete. Please, just write out your entire though out as one singular cohesive message.
When you're writing small, short sentences, there is something off putting about periods. It's just part of the how text based communication has become.
Emojis are good because words can be interpreted with a tone that was unintended, and can lead to all sorts of communication problems. It's small and simple, but an appropriate emoji helps convey our emotions in a way that is more difficult to in short, text based messages.
I agree about rapid short messages, I hate receiving 8 notifications about 1 short paragraph of text.
I always attempt to write, even on Slack or other chat programs, in such a way that no unintended tone comes across. To me it feels like I have failed in communicating if an emoji is necessary to convey a message. I honestly cannot think of anywhere I could use them to make a message clearer. But, I will be asking a few folks if there is an issue with my communication, and if I can be more clear in any way. Including the use of emoji.
To me, it also feels less professional, but this thread has opened my eyes to this bias I have. So I am going to attempt to make less of a judgement on this moving forward.
I think with just the shear amount of messaging that is occurring in todays age combined with the lines being blurred between work and home makes communication rapidly evolve. What one things is clear communication with no ambiguity, another might disagree.
An example is responding back to a message with "Ok.". I see many over, say, 50 do this much more often, but to many under, say 30, this is taken as very passive aggressive.
> An example is responding back to a message with "Ok.". I see many over, say, 50 do this much more often, but to many under, say 30, this is taken as very passive aggressive.
I can see how some might take a single "Ok." that way, but it probably really does depend a lot on context and the nature of the relationship. I tend to acknowledge most people's comments in a very mater-of-fact manner, but I feel adding a simple "thank you" (as in "Ok, thank you.") helps to dispel the raw bluntness of a plain "Ok."
"Please", "sorry", and "thank you"--these magic words can work wonders.
> An example is responding back to a message with "Ok.". I see many over, say, 50 do this much more often, but to many under, say 30, this is taken as very passive aggressive.
Definitely have experienced this.
> shear
sheer
> What one things is clear communication with no ambiguity, another might disagree.
thinks
> todays
today's
> age combined with the lines being blurred between work and home makes
age, combined with the lines being blurred between work and home, makes
> I think with just the... ...makes communication rapidly evolve
I think just the... ...makes communication rapidly evolve
Correcting someone’s English is usually seen as a sign of social posturing, because higher education is often related to someone’s self-perception of social status ranking. It takes a extremely skilled approach to do it without causing offence.
It is especially poor form on HN, because you cannot know whether English is their second language, or whether there are other reasons for mistakes (such as being in a hurry, having dyslexia, or having a disability.)
If you are a native English speaker, higher education should not be required for basic writing. There is no requirement to use complicated words, but I'd expect someone to be able to spell correctly (especially on a device with spell checking).
If you are not a native speaker, corrections are one way to learn from your mistakes and improve your English.
If you are in a hurry then maybe you should wait until you are not in a hurry before posting to HN.
I do agree that correcting someone often comes across in a bad way, but at the same time so does leaving a comment riddled with mistakes.
I see the issue as more pretentious than anything else -- I know how to spell correctly, I have fucking spellcheck just like you do, but I don't give enough of a damn to go back through and right click every dumb typo and issue; especially when im typing on a phone or a shitty chat app with random delays
If the only thing you got from my whole post is my missed period, especially if my post was a response/argument to whatever you claimed, you're either a moron or intentionally trying to one-up me in an aspect that nobody cares about
Grammar is not a signal of intelligence in short-form communications. In long-form/formal communications, it's a minimum barrier to entry (if you can't even be assed to type your name properly, why should I bother with your 50 page paper?), but different context, different systems, different rules
The worst case for fixing someone's typo is when you know their first language isn't English and assume that's where the mistake comes from. 99% of the time I make mistakes due to swipe/predictive input changing something I don't notice. Yet it gets pointed out by someone repeatedly writing "should of" or asking for simple spelling advice.
Depends on what you are correcting I think. Correcting shear to sheer was the immediate thing I mentally did when reading the message, because if you don’t, people will keep doing this wrong in more important settings too.
All the punctuation is less important and I wouldn’t really bother with it.
Muphry's law in action. On the second-to-last, they moved a comma (wrongly), and completely missed the major typo (possibly just autocorrected back to the wrong thing). It should be: "over, say, 50 yo" ("yo" being short for "years old"), and the other half should always have a comma after "30" (the one after "say" is optional depending on where they put pauses when they speak).
Just remember that beyond words, our expressions, gestures, and tone, are all important parts of effective human communication, and text lacks all of that. Subtlety in meaning or intent can change while still using the same words. Slack isn't formal writing, it's more casual communication between humans, and emojis just make it all a little less ambiguous. I certainly agree that you should try to be as clear as possible, and that overuse of emojis can be tiresome, but there are definitely situations where a simple emoji or two can make all the difference in how your words are perceived.
Comparing Slack to email, in an email I generally provide a feedback sandwich: start with a positive note or warm introduction, transition into a call to action with explanatory details, and again end on a positive note.
In Slack I find that I can use emoji in lieu of some of the positivity, if that makes sense.
If I have any takeaway from this conversation it is that I should use _more_ emoji simply because a lot of emotional context is being lost through the internet. I feel like this is especially important because I manage people and my tone can really matter.
I agree, I think the only appropriate time for an emoji is to acknowledge somebodies else's message but you don't have anything you want to say. A thumbs up or a celebrate.
I disagree, I think there's many times where a statement can clearly seem hostile, or jovial, at the same time, and adding some emojis to lean towards jovial will make it a 100% safe message.
Sure, you can add context in other ways, but it's quick, easy, and effective. Is it unprofessional? Perhaps in an email, but I don't consider every slack message something that should be "professional" in tone. You don't speak professionally to every person IRL (or, at least I hope you don't).
I have a small group of emoji that I turn to for this kind of color. :sweat_smile: for a note of self-aware awkwardness. :thinking: when I'm posing an idea without standing behind it too hard, or when my thoughts are continuing beyond the message I've just sent. A few others are not uncommon, but more situational.
(I'm using their Slack codes here, since I'm not sure I can just embed them directly in an HN comment...)
I tend to come across in text as very detail-oriented and precise, so some careful emoji usage helps recover some of the consideration that would normally be carried by tone or body language.
This type of use is exactly what I was talking about in my original post. It does wonders for positive communication. Even if some don't see the need for it, as the article discusses, you need to consider your full audience!
I mostly just use the 3 or 4 "base" emojis. But, particularly in relatively terse emails/messages, I think it's often useful to indicate that you don't intend to be taken literally/totally seriously/etc. I suppose that you can just avoid making flippant remarks and such but that's not the way most people communicate casually in person.
In my experience this is pretty much a universal norm for all Americans below 30. Putting a period at the end of a sentence may come across as curt or rude.
Note: Rules are different for multi-sentence messages and single sentence messages. For messages with multiple sentences, its fine to insert periods between all sentences, but skip the last one. The above only applies to short messages with a single sentence.
I know that historically, newspaper headlines were lengthier, and quite likely to be a grammatically valid sentence.
However, periods were never used to end them, as absent a period it invited the reader to actually engage with the rest of the story. (This story may be apocryphal, but it sounds reasonable.)
Perhaps there's a little of that going on with people's communications where they wish to imply there exists more than they are saying (which may or may not ultimately be delivered to the reader).
For my part - as an over-30 non-American - I'll stick with standard punctuation.
Worth noting that this carries a lot better in a medium like IRC or Slack, where the message framing implies an "end" in its own right. It looks a little strange in an HN comment, because they all come in the same single message.
Aha - so you're using CR's to denote end of sentences rather than periods, which would be an interesting evolution for the (written) language.
Grouping related thoughts / points as sentences within a single paragraph still feels more right to me than trying to over-succinctify potentially complex concepts into tiny paragraphs.
Language actually changes like this a lot, and it's really interesting ... Back a good 70 years ago, ellipses were commonly used for this in informal mediums such as postcards ... It leads to a very different-feeling messages ... Heard it on a podcast about how the internet has changed grammar [1]
I see it done that way a lot where each small sentence is its own message. Even more annoyingly, they often do it in a main channel on Slack after the message they're responding to, instead of "replying in thread".
Purely anecdotal but I think it’s from irc/aim users (a lot of millennials/genx including myself) since long form communication wasn’t really a thing on there. I see some people write paragraphs as messages on discord servers and iirc that wasn’t technically even possible on irc and I feel like it’s even strange to see in the middle of lighter chatter.
Also slack threads are awful, imo. I can appreciate them in certain contexts like asking what tool everyone likes or where to grab dinner, but if your slack has become a place where complicated tech answers wind up in threads it makes searching so frustrating just due to the UX. Also they’re limited, or were, on features (code blocks never looked right, etc). I HATED when outages wound up in a slack thread and not a room which was too frequent at my last employer.
That #tagging/#threading feature available on the other slack/discord/teams competitor I can’t think of right now is something I really want.
I have to pay attention to not treating slack like irc quite a bit.
If the message is long enough to actually have multiple sentences, each individual sentence has a period. The last sentence simply drops the period.
It's not the use of periods on a per-sentence basis, it's just the last period. For certain demographics this evokes a tone of abrupt and unfriendly finality. But it depends on context.
The book he mentions, Because Internet, goes into more detail. But to over-simplify, there were a few major generations of people joining the internet as well as a generation that never fully joined, and each one developed its own conventions for casual writing on their own. Some used the same mechanism to mean different things.
Hah! Well, I'm so old, I remember having two spaces after every period. And, I, too, hate waking up to 12 notifications, of which 3-4 are usually pings to my team alias, and then seeing a bunch of DM notifications. It makes me feel like I missed something urgent, when, often, it's just people who hate putting periods after the end of their thoughts. Maddening!
To be honest, I have almost all mobile device notifications turned off. Though I realize some people are in groups that have more of an expectation of immediate response.
I don't turn all off. But it's a pretty high bar and those I have notification on for are pretty low volume that I typically do want to respond to or be aware of in a timely manner.
My attempt at explaining why periods at the end feel uncomfortably stiff in a Slack-like environment:
Social conversations are fluid and open-ended, with participants organically shifting between listening and speaking. A period however conveys finality, which is off-putting in such a human setting.
For example, “No.” sounds like the very stern “No” of someone who’s not willing to listen or discuss any further.
> One thing that actually drives me nuts is when people will keep their messages short. Write 5-10 words of a thought out, hit enter, and keep on going. You end up getting 7 notifications in quick succession, and none of it is complete. Please, just write out your entire though out as one singular cohesive message.
This sort of typing really drives me up the wall, too. I submitted a feature request to Slack about a year ago asking that implement some sort of throttle on notifications (they acknowledged my request, but took no action on it).
Basically, for example, I would want to set a throttle to be notified every minute of all messages that were received in the past 60 seconds. So if 4 messages were received in that timeframe, I would only be pinged once instead of 4 times.
I feel that negative emotion from periods on the last sentence (especially for messages that are only one sentence). So if you’re wondering what age range feels that way, you can consider 30 years old your upper bound :)
I disagree about receiving multiple messages in a row. To me, composing longer messages (especially with multiple paragraphs) feels much more formal; it’s like writing an email or a letter rather than having a conversation. I do sometimes write like that, but only on the rare occasion that I need to be particularly formal.
> 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).
100% agree about ending periods. I always read those messages as being irritated or overly firm. Potentially worse, though, are people who have a habit of abusing ellipses (...) in weird places. My boss does this in virtually every sentence, sometimes multiple times, and it always comes off like he can't believe you'd say something so stupid
I find this odd because, to me, attributing malice because of the presence of a period is something you do in your own mind. You don't know the emotional state of the person who sent it, so you think of the worst possible outcome, but both are equally likely in the moment. You're just as free to give them the benefit of the doubt.
You can apply the same reasoning to any of the myriad ways we pick up social, emotional clues from people around us. Facial expressions, body language, brevity, melody, choice of words, clothing, typography, use of emojis, and so on. All of these things are nuanced, vibrant, easily misjudged hints of what another person is feeling, how they see you, or how much they care. You can’t really choose freely how to interpret them, you just do, and sometimes you’re bound to get it wrong.
> You can't really choose freely how to interpret them
Of course, you can.
That first moment of gut feeling is outside the control of your consciousness, but after that, it's a choice.
You can tell yourself, and persuade yourself, that you don't know the why the other person ended a sentence with a period. Because, the fact is, you don't.
Not to mention that an ending period is quite commonly added by dictation software, so it's not even certain that the other person added it by choice.
Furthermore, the myriad of social cues usually emerge in a whole package. You get to see a whole face, or a whole body, with the words, said with human voice. That's significantly more data than the presence of a period.
How you intepret those is absolutely a choice. If you do not have enough information to know 100% what the intention of the other person is, then wherever you land is a decision. If it's that the person is angry, that's your choice the same if you believe the person is not angry.
You sound like you have never worked in the business world before. Half of business is picking up on tone, ambiguous phrasing, and empty promises with smiles. Reading between the lines is a core part of interpreting meaning, and it why many people with autism spectrum disorders really struggle with things like sales, or people management (at least from the customer or employee's side). Nuance is everything here.
If my boss chucks an ellipsis at the end of the message, does that mean he wants me to....
Answer an implied question?
Wait for him to keep writing more information?
That he wants me to justify what he has just said?
It is not a choice as you argue, to interpret meaning behind ambiguous communication, and have effective communication. I cannot ignore implied tone, because I 'don't have 100% certainty of their intention'
You're talking about a completely different situation. In that situation, you should probably ask your boss for more information instead of assuming what he wants based on puncuation. I'm just saying that given the choice between applying malice to the punctuation, maybe do the opposite.
That is entirely true, and I personally try to be very open-minded about how a particular message could have been meant. But you do have to make some decision regarding the interpretation (preferably the most favorable one) in order to compose an adequate reply.
And that's where things get difficult - at least in non-interactive environments. I've become very wary of the thousands of slight misinterpretations that my email messages might allow, and tend to rewrite most sentences once or twice to make the wording as unmistakable as possible (usually in a cycle of "how could this sentence be interpreted uncharitably?" -> fix it up).
With increasing daily email volumes I've had to tone that practice down (at least for less delicate messages) to get anything done at all. But you never really know how something was perceived unless it went really wrong.
> If you do not have enough information to know 100% what the intention of the other person is
That's the thing - you almost never do.
> How you interpret those is absolutely a choice
The crux of the problem here is putting that choice on the reader instead of leaving them without one. Communicating emotion in text solves this issue of interpretation.
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 have been chatting via text, as a major form of communication, for more than 20 years and at least 2/3s of my life. Before this thread, I have never even contemplated a period having any meaning more than the end of a though. And I certainly had no position of authority, so that didn't affect anything.
I am really curious how this evolved, and how I missed it being something people think. My biases tend to lean towards viewing people who don't use punctuation and capitalization as being less professional. I couldn't care less in something like a random chat in discord. But for Slack, as a work tool, I prefer to stay "professional".
I wonder what other seemingly unspoken biases are out there? Especially in a time where we are spending much more time in text instead of in person.
It's not a new or unknown convention/perception (as shown by the article posted here discussing the pissed period in 2013). I can't tell you why you would've been unaware of it, and I certainly wouldn't want to offend by guessing! :P
A lot of it has to be context. If I'm talking to someone new, I'm going to try very hard to read very little into the text they've sent me. If it's a message from my partner -- yeah, every aspect of that message can communicate something to me. And in that latter case, a period on a short statement is a warning sign equivalent to passive-aggressive "I'm fine."
Another thought is it literally changes how I read a sentence. Considering "I'm fine." vs "I'm fine" vs "I'm fine...", the first ends abruptly and is cut off. The second ends more gently and naturally. And the last trails off implying...something depending on the person and context. Consider poetry. No punctuation, a comma, a dash, a semi-colon, or a period each imply a type of pause (or lack of pause) at that moment in the words. And in poetry, that can mean everything.
I am really curious just how common this is. I know that article existed in 2013, but how many people read it and agreed with it? If you produced a large survey across a broad age range and diverse set of background, how common is this? The fact that I have never come across this before today makes me feel biased towards it being rare. But the very existence of this thread seems to indicate it is relatively common.
I know another person in this thread mentioned a study about short (one word) responses being interpreted differently based on punctuation, or lack thereof. But that doesn't appear to have studied full sentences with or without.
With your example, I am basically blind to the existence of the period. So "I'm fine." vs "I'm fine" are identical in my interpretation. Or at least they were before today. The ellipsis does register as a trailing thought, and I definitely read meaning into that.
To me, a sentence should normally end in a period. However, due to the informality of chat, it is acceptable to leave off in the final sentence of a message. It being there vs not being there has never conveyed a meaning to me. I really would like to know how many things people were meaning, which I missed because of this. Or if people are interpreting my inclusion of standard punctation, with no meaning, as something more.
> It's not a new or unknown convention/perception (as shown by the article posted here discussing the pissed period in 2013)
2013 is new.
When you say:
> because experience generally proves out most people only use a period in a single statement message if they're emphasizing firmness
I suspect your experience is with one crowd, and older people's experience is not as much with that crowd. Furthermore, older people simply have a lot more experience by virtue of being older, so that statement is simply not true for them.
Texting and IM is more common amongst the younger crowd, so conventions are going to be more weighted towards their preferences. But the notion of a period being used for emphasis is limited to that crowd. For the majority of the population (and perhaps including those who are non-native English speakers), putting a period at the end is fairly normal, and considered correct.
Language is dynamic, so I don't doubt that in 20 years I'll be "wrong".
That's a large assumption without knowing a thing about me. Though I exist in a bubble as everyone else. Age with internet chatting is interesting because no matter how old you are, there is actually a finite amount of experience anyone alive today could have with it. There's a large age block that irrespective of the individual age probably have about the same level of experience with chat (i.e. starting on usenet/IRC and staying with it all until now). Oh, I know some fortran. Still wanna guess my age?
I'm going to re-emphasize a point I made earlier that invalidates any age-based arguments: Poetry. The conventions of interpreting far more meaning from punctuation than a reader tends to from long form prose have been around far longer than anyone alive today.
Suspect is not equal to assume. Maybe another cultural convention. :-)
I've been online since the mid-80s and also only learned about this period thing this year. So, no matter how old this convention is, it seems to have been in a minority until recently.
It's specifically something that came out of SMS, where people have traditionally conserved characters (and typing punctuation could be annoying on earlier phones). Intentionally using unnecessary punctuation in a context where it's not conventional seems like a shift to formality, or coldness. It's like a parent using their child's full name when they usually go by a nickname (or, god forbid, their full first AND middle name).
I have been chatting via text, as a major form of communication, for more than 20 years and at least 2/3s of my life. Before this thread, I have never even contemplated a period having any meaning more than the end of a though. And I certainly had no position of authority, so that didn't affect anything.
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.
> I don't agree that putting a period in casual textual communication is inherently hostile
In communication, your opinion of how something will be interpreted is far less important than opinions of the people doing the interpretation. You can stand firm in believing that adding the period doesn't make your message more hostile, but that won't change how your readers feel.
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 know it's a thing and I have felt it myself in the past.
What I really have trouble with is that we all admit it's most likely a faulty interpretation, but we still expect the other person to manage it for us. If everyone gave each other the benefit of the doubt more, none of this would be necessary.
ATTRIBUTING ANGER TO ME JUST BECAUSE I'M WRITING IN ALL CAPS IS SOMETHING YOU'RE DOING IN YOUR HEAD, BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN I SHOULDN'T TAKE INTO ACCOUNT THE FACT THAT MY WRITING THIS WAY WILL PROVOKE THAT REACTION FROM OTHERS.
I've noticed a quirk when communicating over IM with many of my Indian colleagues. They use two dots (..) really often and I'm not sure how to interpret it. If I view it as equivalent to a three for ellipsis, it often comes across as rude or passive aggressive which I can't believe to be the intention.
Is anyone else familiar with this and can shed some light?
I'm not Indian, but I used to do this a lot when I was younger. My thought process was that a single dot would come across as serious or passive-aggressive (there's a discussion about this phenomenon somewhere in this thread) and ellipses would similarly be rude. Two dots somehow seemed like a nice way to come across as more friendly, and/or indicate a tiny pause between sentences.
I used to do this in the times when we were separately charged for every text with our cellular service. I'd try to fit as many sentences as possible to each sent message. With the rise of internet based texting, it became unnecessary to use sentence separators, because I could just separate them by sending multiple messages (and not use any punctuation at the end of each sentence, which is the current accepted "friendly" way of communication).
...I have a coworker who starts nearly every sentence thus so, as if continuing from the last sentence, even if you haven't talked to him in a few days.
Someone I converse with regularly online has a tendency to do this in a way that strongly conveys "your idiocy has left me speechless" in contexts where he seems to (or at least claims to) only intend "your position is surprising".
I actually just posted about the ellipses elsewhere in this thread ... Much in the same way that carriage returns are used to signify new sentences instead of periods in certain internet environments, ellipses used to be common sentence-separators in other mediums during the mid-20th century ... Specifically, if you dig up old postcards from that time, you'll find them littered with ellipses
I've come across the period-as-negative idea before. I communicate in text media to audiences ranging from people in their early twenties to several decades my senior. I strive to communicate similarly to all. This includes capitalization and punctuation. I've discussed the negative period with several folks in this range, and none indicate that they view my communication as abrupt, brief, or negative, but that they do sometimes notice that with others.
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.
My default view of messages in what seems quickly to be becoming the common text style (all lower-case with abbreviations and no punctuation, written in fits of stream-of-consciousness) expresses laziness and a sense of self-importance on the part of the author. I find that assuming good intentions of the author is a much better stance to take. Thus, I choose to interpret positively what might otherwise seem negative to me. If someone else is incapable of looking past a period, then my communication must be very poor indeed, and I must make efforts to improve it.
> 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."
Even absent a study providing empirical evidence (the OP might not even have been referring to any sort of study, perhaps his comment was meant to reference his personal experience) the statement could still be true. If you are sending primarily one-sentence messages, as many people do in SMS/iMessage/Slack, the line break effectively serves the function of denoting the end of a single sentence. And if that is the case, what is the purpose of a period other than to add additional, perhaps emotional, meaning to the sentence?
If a one-word response would seem more negative or less enthusiastic with a period, then I posit it was not carrying a positive or enthusiastic message in the first place. If I want someone to interpret a one-word answer as enthusiastic, I'll put a bloody exclamation point on it.
And you get back to the real core of my point (though I could probably have been clearer).
> 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.
I punctuate fastidiously. In my un-blinded, anecdotal data, my interlocutors do not interpret my punctuation negatively. Sometimes they say my vocabulary makes it seem like I'm too big for my britches ... and that I use archaic idioms.
Cool bro, you know how to use big words, but you don't seem to know when to use them. That doesn't make you smarter than most, it makes your writing more obtuse.
It's usually the shift in tone or language that people notice. If you always call you husband darling and one day call him by name, the man's going to piss his pants wondering what he did wrong. If you write informally and without punctuation and one day shift to a formal message with proper punctuation, the change in tone won't go unnoticed. It signals a change in the relationship, barring any other major shifts.
I think calling it a negative is overstating it, but it's what people go to because we don't really have a word for it. It's more like, an "I'm-putting-my-foot-down", don't argue with me, extra bit of finality. Kind of like a parent telling something to their kid with an air of authority, or the kid shutting down when the parent isn't accepting what they're saying.
For me, this started in the early 2000s with SMS, and really only applies to chat-style messages, which is why I have no problem using periods here.
You have it completely backwards: "the way I always do" is chat-based. Has been for over a decade, even at work, where we barely use email. HN is the exception.
What was explained that I haven't encountered before? My original post in this thread clearly states that I have come across the phenomena before, and that I have explored it with multiple people.
You assume someone doesn't understand something, because they hold an opinion different than yours. And you judge moral character for making a joke online.
And elsewhere in this thread, you are attempting to police my behavior and tell me when it is okay for me to speak.[0] Despite this, you clearly feel yourself to have the moral high ground over me.
Regardless of what you might think or believe, I evaluate my prior replies in light of every response, even yours. Will you evaluate your officious tone and domineering attitude?
[0] Specifically, not now, after you have determined I do not understand. How am I to learn if a demonstration of ignorance (or at least that indicates such to you) is a prompt to stop talking?
> I've come across the period-as-negative idea before.
I've never come across the period-as-negative idea before. From the discussion here, it sounds like in-group signalling. For me, punctuation is an unconsious part of writing, and it would take special effort (or a browser extension) to remove it so as not to be marked as an outsider.
Your mention of messages ending in a period and this topic in general really makes me recommend Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch. It's a book by a linguist about the evolution of language on the internet.
It does a great job at not only showing how this evolution happened, especially around communicating emotions and things like sarcasm, but also at describing the different cohorts who started using the internet at different times and under different circumstances.
It actually has changed how I write on slack. I'm now for example more deliberate about omitting or including periods, break up what before would have been a long, email-like message into smaller messages.
It also made me aware that ellipses have different meaning for different age groups
ending periods actually have negative emotion in text vernacular now for younger audiences and should almost never be used in 1-1 messaging
That is extremely problematic, since I've already lost track of how many misparses (and resulting conflict over misunderstanding the meaning) have happened because of someone who wrote what should be multiple .-separated sentences as a single long and unpunctuated stream of text.
A memorable example: There is a huge difference between
Once multiple sentences are on the table, it matters a lot less. The real significant line is between "zero periods; none needed" and "one redundant period at the end."
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.
> 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
>For abbreviations, it's simply know your audience
I've learned to avoid abbreviations and acronyms whenever possible in writing. If it's fast back-and-forth messaging, that could be fine to save time typing. Otherwise, people are very good at seeing long names as single "symbols."
For example, I don't use "CI" for "confidence interval" in reports. I just write both words every time. No confusion, and I doubt there's a difference in reading speed.
Obviously, there are exceptions when space for text is limited (presentation slides, labels in a chart).
I am astounded that anyone thinks that adding emojis can solve anything related to clarity of communication. We might as well be interpreting Egyptian cartoushes, for the lack of clarity involved.
A laughing emoji would let us know that you think it's funny that people are this inarticulate, although it'd be a touch condescending.
An eye-roll emoji would indicate a frustration with the problem, suggesting that it personally affects you in some way — perhaps your relatives are using too many emojis and it irritates you personally.
A frown emoji, meanwhile, would suggest a more sincere concern for the state of written communication in our culture, and would imply that you think something important is being lost.
Explaining the meaning of those three unicode characters in context took an additional 480 characters. Can you see why people use them? They're very efficient.
I appreciate the response, and the emphasis on adding emotional context in a shorthand. However:
- There are over 3,000 emojis defined in unicode, which is a very large vocabulary in which to become expert.
- There is no well-defined meaning for any of the emojis, even the "simple" common ones. One must try to infer from shared context what the sender means. This is fraught with error opportunities.
- They mean different things to different subgroups, and act as an "in-group" credential in many cases.
- They are visually very indistinct, and can be difficult to distinguish one from another for people who have less than perfect vision, or color-blindness.
- For people with autism or other non-neurotypical processing they can be completely unintelligible, rendering the communication even less successful than "traditional" language.
In short, emojis are undefined, colloquial, designed for only a small portion of the population, and have constantly shifting interpretations of a vast dictionary of symbols.
I don't know why that's a good idea for improving the clarity of communication.
> There are over 3,000 emojis defined in unicode, which is a very large vocabulary in which to become expert.
Most of those emoji aren't commonly used. There's a falafel emoji; no one's going around adding a falafel to the end of their messages trying to impart some hidden meaning.
> There is no well-defined meaning for any of the emojis, even the "simple" common ones.
There's also no well-defined meaning to a shrug or an eye-roll, but it's still a useful way of communicating emotion. Semantically, an emoji isn't used like a word. It's used like a gesture or facial expression. In practice, the message is usually quite clear — clearer, in fact, than if an emoji hadn't been used, since in the absence of tone-of-voice and body language text can itself create ambiguity.
> They mean different things to different subgroups, and act as an "in-group" credential in many cases.
Do you have an example of an emoji meaning different things to different groups? In my experience they have a pretty consistent meaning across our culture — even the more abstract ones, like an upside-down smile. The only barrier is "whether or not you're familiar with the typical meaning," and that's the case for any expression or colloquialism. If I say "they're like two peas in a pod" and you have no idea what that means, that doesn't mean it's an in-group signifier. Granted, familiarity with emojis correlates with age, but that's the same with any linguistic shift.
> They are visually very indistinct, and can be difficult to distinguish one from another for people who have less than perfect vision, or color-blindness.
I'm sure there are accessibility options which people can configure on their phones to minimize this. Large-text mode, for instance, or a high-contrast emoji font. Text itself is a medium which isn't very accessible to vision-impaired people, and we have developed solutions for that.
> For people with autism or other non-neurotypical processing they can be completely unintelligible, rendering the communication even less successful than "traditional" language.
Autistic people also have trouble understanding the meaning of facial expressions and of metaphors sometimes, but that doesn't mean that those shouldn't be used in conversation. It just means that everyone should know their audience.
---
I don't think you've raised any serious practical issues — they seem to be all special cases, such as "what if you're talking to an autistic person or a blind person or an older person." Under those circumstances I would communicate differently, same as if I were speaking to a deaf person, or emailing a blind person, or talking to someone with poor English skills. There is no universally-viable way of communicating, but emoji typically reduce ambiguity and add layers of expression to a message, so in most cases they're a good choice.
I've expanded on my objections a bit in a sibling comment, but to address "/s": it doesn't have many of the emoji drawbacks.
It is literal shorthand for a well-defined word whose definition can be found. It is visually distinct, and follows the centuries of typographical design we use to acquire written symbols. And it refers to a well-known concept.
So I have no objection to it.
Of course there are some symbols which are easier to visually acquire, and seem to refer to well-defined concepts. But even the various smileys are unintelligible as to their meaning when taken as a group.
So once one gets off the basic "smiling face/thumbs up/thumbs down" subset I'd say it is a disaster for communication in a professional setting, and is exclusionary in a way that its proponents actually want it to be - as an in-group indicator that makes them feel a part of something that "others" are not.
As someone of the younger generation who grew up always using mostly proper punctuation over texts, and avoided abbreviations for common terms this hits home.
I'm 28 for reference, and I get VERY different vibes from those younger than me who join slack, and those older (40+ or so). The difference in meaning for different punctuation for these crowds is SO evident, I feel like I'm always playing translator for even the language I grew up speaking and writing.
The biggest example of this is the ellipsis among the older crowd. In informal messaging that I grew accustomed to it went from being overused, to nowadays seeming like you are being sarcastic or angry about something. So among the younger crowd I see it almost never used anymore. On the other hand the older generations picked it up from how we used to use it, as a sort of pause. But they co-opted it as probably the most common punctuation used in their messaging. I'm not joking when I will sometimes receive a message from an older coworker that will contain an ellipsis every 5 words or so.
It's always been interesting deciphering the actual meaning of some messages based on solely age of the sender.
This all to say, deciphering punctuation at all in informal writing is an interesting game.
I'm 20 and I've noticed how true this is. I find myself "code switching" depending on who I'm messaging at work.
I've had a few profs that would the ellipsis for every single sentence, and my brain subconsciously treated his emails as mysterious. It's not too bad once you get used to it.
There's also the weird thing of younger people like myself avoiding proper punctuation/capitalization for the aesthetic. Mainly because a lack of proper writing can make certain messages feel more "relaxed" and casual, if that makes sense.
>There's also the weird thing of younger people like myself avoiding proper punctuation/capitalization for the aesthetic. Mainly because a lack of proper writing can make certain messages feel more "relaxed" and casual, if that makes sense.
I don't think it's weird at all, and I don't think it's simply aesthetic. All these things (punctuation, capitalization, emoji/emoticons, representations of non-verbal communication like "lol" and "hmm", message boundaries, message send times) are ways of conveying tone, nuance, and a personal voice in an otherwise sterile, flat medium.
These nuances have been around as long as we've had instant messaging, but the specifics have changed over time. Representations of laughter are a good example: over the years we've had (in no order) "lol", "Lol", "LOL", "rofl", "ROFL", "lmao", "lmfao", "LMAO", "LMFAO", "hah", "haha", "hahaha", "HAHAHAHA", "roflmao", "roflcopter", and others. Over time the nuances of these options have changed, with some no longer au courant (the rofl family is currently outmoded), just as spoken slang and language rapidly evolve. Punctuation choices and so on follow similar patterns.
I do roll my eyes a little bit at some of the wild prescriptivism that can be found in this thread, which I think completely misses the point. The footnote from the original post I find especially infuriating:
>sloppy with their written communication, which is to say "careless and unsystematic; excessively casual".
Casual speech is not sloppy! Choices of punctuation, capitalization, and so on are deliberate.
Sorry I'm not claiming it was something completely new, I'm simply stating that it's usage in informal speak has seemed to pick up the same usage it was originally when the younger generation started using it for informal communication channels like texting. But as it has adapted for the younger crowd it has remained the same (highly anecdotal) among those I interact with who are older.
You are correct in that it is anecdotal, but across the board among those I interact with it has seemed to reign true. And from those my age I talk to they seem to mostly agree.
It could also be a case of when I do see it used regardless of age, it appears to either be overused, or rarely used, and overuse tends to lean older.
I had the same observation years ago. Like 2001. Folks that were 40+ at the time used ellipsis for pause or dramatic effect vastly more than the younger, tech savvy kids at the time. I've been downvoted previously for the observation. :shrug:
Clarity in communication is undervalued. Things like punctuation are a great start, but we can go even further. Avoiding acronyms where possible is often good for this, particularly if you can build a culture where asking people to expand acronyms happens.
A tough side-effect of this I've seen though is the possibility of excluding some non-native English speakers, both in terms of making it harder for them to consume content because of it using a wider vocabulary, and making it harder for them to succeed (in things like interviews) because of higher communications standards.
I don't know where I fall on this, because it does allow for better communication, it just requires more from participants. In fact poor communicators would be excluded regardless of their native language.
One convention I've found useful is to define any acronym, or even any word or phrase that's used in a nonstandard way, the first time it's used in a conversation. Additionally, acronyms frequently pick up additional meanings than those you get from the individual words that comprise them, so you probably should not just expand the acronym the first time you use it. Consider the acronym "DDL", as in "Data Definition Language". If you're not familiar with the term, you will be equally lost whether someone says "The prod DB is down because the third DDL migration of the release hung" or "The production database is down because the third Data Definition Language migration of the release hung". If you instead say "The prod DB is down because the third DDL migration (DDL migrations = schema changes like adding or removing columns or tables)", everyone who's worked with a database before knows what happened even if they don't necesssarily know exactly what DDL stands for.
Acronyms are nice when you've got a long, frequently used phrase, as long as everyone in the conversation knows what they mean. I think banning acronyms entirely would be eliminating all of the useful value from the practice of using acronyms, while not necessarily addressing the largest problem that the use of acronyms causes.
I think the goal should not be to lower the standards for everyone, it should be to help bring people up to the basic standards.
The more often people write informally, the more difficult it is for non-native speakers to learn correct grammar. I almost always use full sentences and correct punctuation in all forms of communication. But I make sure to always write correctly when I'm communicating with non-native speakers. I am doing them a disservice, otherwise. And it's also frustrating to me when I'm learning a language and what I'm reading from native speakers is below even my capability.
Also, I think there's a difference between making mistakes in a foreign language, and being lazy or not caring. For example, capitalizing the first letter of a sentence or the word "I" is something that 99% of people know they should do. So that mistake is not usually due to lack of fluency in a language.
I've spent my whole life using punctuation and full sentences when typing. Does it make me seem cold? Maybe, but it'd take more conscious effort for me to change it at this point, which sorta defeats the purpose of some commenters here claiming that it would increase communication speed, at least for me. As far as reading what others write, I really don't care, and find it sort of bizarre that anyone would.
I think coldness/warmth of the messaging style is much more dependent on emoji use, at least in Slack.
I couldn't imagine writing without at least attempting to use proper grammar. Especially in German where ignoring capitalization makes a difference of night and day.
My reasoning has been similar to the one of the author, but more on a "positivity" than a plain productivity level. If it's easy for others to read my messages and not having to puzzle over them, I hope that it will leave them with overall a more positive association of writing/communicating with me. And that not only goes for professional texting, but writing with friends (or dating) as well. I know it won't always come out perfect, but overall I think it shows some level of respect towards the other person.
I've been on the internet 16 hours a day from a young age, and I've never used smilies/emojis/emoticons, except very ironically in some rare cases. I don't think they're necessary, and I find use of "informal IM style" (eliding capitalization and final periods) to be much more telling of tone, personally, especially among young people.
Periods + capitalization (when writing in English) over IM comes across as "cold" to me, whether or not someone's using emoji; unless they're above a certain age, of course.
I use emojis very sparingly, but I almost always include some sort of positive comment if I've had a long exchange or back and forth with someone, like an "Oh wow, thanks for bringing this to my attention" or an "I also had trouble with this at first" or a "If you need anything else let me know". I try to keep things conversational but still type well, because that's just what I've always done, in work and socially.
Actually something I've been wondering, as somebody learning German right now: are there equivalents to this kind of slang in online German? Would you _ever_ leave a noun, for example, uncapitalized, for a more casual feel?
I wouldn't, and among my friends it's rather rare, but yeah there are people that don't capitalize when texting casually (or in any form of written text like my mom, which drives me insane).
> As far as reading what others write, I really don't care, and find it sort of bizarre that anyone would.
The main one that trips me up is when people use acronyms I'm not familiar with. Then I try to Google for them, but sometimes it's hard to find, or ambiguous.
Acronyms and other jargon are the exceptions, absolutely. But half the time when I see these used it seems more like "intelligence signaling" than an actual means of making communication more efficient. Domain specific jargon might be unavoidable and should be elaborated on, especially for new people, but the business newspeak that gets thrown around a lot is almost always unnecessary, in my opinion.
Acronyms are similar to slang/jargon in that they are understandable only to a specific audience, and may have a confusing meaning for someone unfamiliar.
Which makes me wonder if the author of the article used the noun "ask" deliberately, and whether it simply means "question".
Using that word out of carelessness in an article about the clarity of communication, with a mention of non-native speakers would be ironic.
I feel like people complaining about this didn't grow up in the IRC/IM era. It probably depends on your corp's culture as well, but for us, Slack is a very informal communcation mechanism. If you need to write something formal, you use an email. Slack is equivalent to shouting out to the room (as if you were there in person).
I definitely grew up in the IRC/IM era and continue to run one of the larger IRC networks in the world... But people using proper sentence structure and 'all in one' messages are often the people you want to talk to.
There are some people who basically braindump many lines of text with no punctuation but they are not the most common and it's a signal that the person does not respect the room- so they are somewhat scorned even if not directly.
I think it's less about formalism than it is about clear communication.
People will also be confused if you shout out a message to the room without appropriate pauses (commas or periods) or without the right tone (question marks).
But that's the thing, if you ever used IM for a significant amount of time, you know you don't need punctuation. Question marks, yes, he's right about that.. but I certainly don't add periods at the end of every five word chat post. Maybe if you're writing a paragraph in Slack go for it, but if I have a few sentences to say I'll usually just send them in a few messages instead. This whole idea of writing formal multi-sentence messages in Slack shows the author's dissonance with how real-time-chat is supposed to work (keeping in mind that Slack is supposed to be next-generation-corp-IRC).
And how is real-time chat “supposed to” work? It presents a text box to type into. The text that I type in there is proper English, with correct punctuation and sentence structure. I don’t see how it being real-time suddenly means you need to abandon that.
In the same way, face to face communication doesn’t suddenly abandon inflection or tone simply because it is real-time.
And again, I think it comes down to culture. In your workplace, you're in a room with your coworkers: do you ask "Excuse me everyone, could I have a moment of your time? Does anyone know the status on the internal project Crusade Against Initialisms? Thanks in advance!" or do you say "yo what's the latest on CAI?". In our org, Slack is the same as talking in person (since we, you know, can't do that anymore thanks to WFH and whatnot).
I don't think it's so much a corporate culture thing as a context thing. There are certainly channels in my work Slack that I feel compelled to add more kindness phrases to when engaging.
Following your metaphor: if I were in a room with a couple hundred other people I _probably would_ say "excuse me" before shouting a question.
In both instances they disturb the train of thought which is why I am not a huge fan of open plan offices, nor instant messaging during coding and concentrating. It’s why libraries don’t have buzzers and bells going off.
> 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.
I can't debate what some perceive as costly because it's an honest reaction to reading some forms of text.
In my case, all lowercase and lack of punctuation don't bother me or slow me down. (I'll agree on uncommon acronyms hindering understanding.)
To reduce some frustrations... listen to linguist McWhorter explaining that people should think of texting (or Slack) as "transcribed informal speech" -- instead of formal writing.[1]
That said, the author Mitch Lee's bio says he's a cofounder of Penny. If you are employed by him and are communicating at his company via Slack, it's better for your career if you follow his guidelines.
>listen to linguist McWhorter explaining that people should think of texting (or Slack) as "transcribed informal speech" -- instead of formal writing.[1]
I can't watch the video right now, but even in informal speech, I hear periods and commas. I think that those are necessary for communication. Not including them, as I mention in another comment above (or below?), induces a cognitive load on the reader. Nobody should be asking for perfection on Slack, but mostly correct should be the bar.
Sure, commas should be used when grammatically necessary, but a period before a newline is not going to make a big difference one way or the other in terms of cognitive load.
In academic writing, the general rule is that whenever you introduce an acronym, you must first use the full version.
For example: You must always be mindful of privacy laws when handling personal health information (PHI). Remember, that you may only access PHI when necessary to do your job, and never to fulfill personal curiosity about a patient.
Unfortunately, this doesn't work for a chat room because it's not meant to be read from beginning to end. My personal rule is to never use acronyms, unless I can follow the above rule.
I've worked in many different industries, and learning acronyms has been a consistent and pointless barrier to achieving productivity. I don't want to put that onto anyone else. Even worse, you run the risk of your reader ignoring the lesson entirely, simply because they don't know what the acronym means.
In and of itself, "PHI" does not seem any more important than any other acronym. On the other hand, "personal health information," has an obvious connotation of importance.
There is a good book about the evolution of written communication as the Internet evolved. "Because Internet" by Gretchen McCulloch goes into some of the subtle implications of using punctuation such as periods ending sentences, capitalization, etc. Text makes it difficult to convey emotions and subtlety so even using punctuation can add signal to the communication channel. It turns out there is relatively powerful tonal communication through those deviations on "standard" English grammar rules. Similarly, Emoji also acts as a replacement for gesturing.
Very interesting book and worth reading to understand how to tailor communication for the medium.
I feel like (so, of course, this is how I use instant messaging) periods at the end of a message suggest the logical conclusion of a thought, and are far too formal to use with every message. Email, sure, but not chat. (I do use question marks and capitalize in general, but periods in particular seem strange to me.)
Could you explain this more because it's completely foreign to me. For me a period is the end of a sentence. It has nothing to do with ending the message I'm trying to get across. Is this a cultural or generational or professional field difference? I'd never heard of the idea that a period would be too formal in any context.
It's definitely something that I notice with instant messages. Periods are used between sentences in a multi-sentence message, but if you put them at the end, you might seem upset -- especially if the sentence is short.
This is probably because:
- IMs are already formatted to show the end of each message (chat bubble, etc), so a period communicates extra 'finality' beyond what is necessary;
- Sentence fragments are normal and expected, but seem weird with a period at the end;
- Using formality in an informal setting can create a sense of emotional distance;
- IM cues like these are likely established and spread by people who have mostly used IM in non-professional settings, with friends and significant others, and those norms are then brought with them when interpreting the IMs they receive in a professional setting. If you never communicated with your significant other via text message, you've probably never needed to express as many subtle emotional signals into your texts, and so just treat them like emails. But if you have, then you eventually pick up how powerful punctuation can be at communicating emotion in that medium.
The only way in which that strikes me as "weird" at all is that the second person responded in a different style than the person they are responding. That is, there's nothing inherently weird or awkward about the period. Imagine, for example, this instead:
> I'll be home late tonight.
>> Okay.
I don't think anybody would bat an eyelash at either part of this exchange, because they "match" in style.
I am about as young as a full time enterprise employee can be, and I find this thread fascinating.
Because while I totally agree with the individual that you are replying too, I TOTALLY see how it could seem ridiculous to someone with the periods-end-sentences perspective.
Let me try and come up with an ideal example. Consider this IM to a friendly teammate concerning an important (but not critical) meeting:
> did we get everything sorted out for the meeting this afternoon? we cant screw it up again
> Did we get everything sorted out for the meeting this afternoon? We can't screw it up again
> Did we get everything sorted out for the meeting this afternoon? We can't screw it up again.
In my world, the first two communicate pretty much the same thing. In the first example, you could probably even replace the question mark with a comma. I would likely send the second message, as I prefer descriptive, detail-adding punctuation. I would be less likely to send the third message to a young coworker because it seems standoffish.
Having said all that, any of the three messages would suffice. Someone mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but we - or at least the younger generation - have all become quite good at code switching. Crazy times
It made more sense when I followed some other links in this discussion. Read this:
Hey.
Or this exchange:
Statement: We got the tickets for tonight!
Response: Yay.
It comes off as very flat or dry. Unenthused. A plain "Yay" with no punctuation would be better here. I wonder if this is the context that we're missing and others aren't providing, because I almost always use punctuation, including periods, in my messages. No one has ever complained. But with short messages, like these, I would never use a period. For full sentences, however, I can't think of any occasion outside being rushed where I wouldn't end it with a period.
IMO, it looks dry, because an exclamation mark would be more appropriate. If you just omit the punctuation, it can be interpreted as if you omitted the "!", but with the full stop you explicitly say that you don't mean "Yay!".
It's pretty common with people I know born from 1980 and beyond. Of course, it gets more common the closer their year of birth is to the aughts. But I guess you are right, everyone doing it today was under 20 at some point.
As someone born in the late 80s I've only heard about it from the press. I really sometimes omit periods in one-sentence text messages, but sometimes I don't, and it wouldn't come to my mind to ascribe any semantics to this.
My personal nitpick is people writing a stream of one-sentence messages without punctuation instead of a longer structured message - that definitely carries the connotation of unstructured thinking to me - but it doesn't have much to do with full stops per se.
Unstructured messages in a serious place is annoying, yes, but in a water cooler area it can set a more relaxed tone. It's a cultural thing and I'd never force someone to endure my style of communication in a place where it's not welcome.
I agree with you that for your final sentence it's optional. That said, I still do it.
But that's kind of ancillary to the point of this post, no? The main point it's trying to drive home is be as informative as possible. Don't assume your audience knows your tone, your conventions, your abbreviations.
I suspect this is largely for those who have newly entered the work force, who may only know texting style communication (with friends, shared corpus of knowledge), and formal business communication, and this is to warn them that Slack, while less formal than the latter, doesn't imply the shared context that the former would often have.
Periods generally end sentences, and if that sentence convenes a thought, they do conclude the thought. I consider that to be the default mode of conversation, regardless of whether it's chat or mail or whatever. I like it when people take the effort to bring their thoughts to a conclusion rather than flooding me with cheap stream-of-consciousness-style conversation (cheap for them, not for me), and I tend to treat others the same way I want to be treated.
If I want to explicitly leave a thought open for continuation, especially in chat style communication, I place three periods at the end of a sentence. I consider that an invitation to the reader's mind to conclude the sentence. So it's either one period or three of them for me, but none at all just feels wrong.
I frequently hit return rather than typing a period. However, I feel that's not really good practice, as I often see myself sending a lot of small messages which could probably be better summarised with a couple well thought out sentences.
It really depends on the context. If people tend to fire off every sentence into the channel as they think, the person who writes a paragraph is going to come off strangely. The reverse is also true.
Same, but not sure why now that you mention it. I'm a stickler for grammar, oxford commas and all, but in messaging, periods feel...rude at times. I can't explain why, perhaps it is the 'conclusion in thought' aspect.
This discussion is really confusing me. Are people talking about periods being negative when used anywhere? when used in the last sentence in a multi-sentence message? when used at the end of a single sentence/thought message?
I suspect people are talking about periods being negative specifically in IM/text message contexts, like Slack, where "send message" has taken over the role of period and period has morphed into an extra signal for something like "finality."
Many times I've started writing something I intend to be a single sentence so I'll be lax about capitalization. Then I realize a second sentence is warranted so I go back to fix things and carry on. IM really is an odd medium.
Whenever I read a sentence with a period in my head, I read it in a very flat tone, since the period explicitly excludes any exclamation point, question mark, emoji, etc. So that makes it sound weird when someone uses a period in casual conversation, because if I was talking to them on person they would usually have some kind of emotion.
For example, I would read "Sounds good" in a generally positive way just like when someone is saying that in person, but when I read "Sounds good." I read it without any emotion in my head which sounds wierd.
There is a cargo-cult tech management trend where people use low-effort, sloppy messages and even rudeness as a status signal. I get that the simplest things are the important ones, and wall of text details are usually prevarication, but Slack isn't Tinder.
Like project managers think they're channelling Bezos with "?" messages. I can see how some people interpret "stupid" as "powerful," when that's their experience of authority and then they just imitate it, but it's worth being aware that it breeds contempt.
Heh, my Slack messages are way more casual than Tinder messages. I think the essential difference is I just met someone who I'm talking to on Tinder (hopefully :D), while on Slack I'm probably talking to someone I've known for years; it's fundamentally more casual.
The "?" has its reputation from what the institution and leadership appears to have created around it. That Amazon's "?" means "Drop everything and get back to me within a day because it may be of great priority to the company" is an artifact created through years of interaction.
"?" and "!" are great for a quick/informal communication of curiosity or interest.
If my partner gets an unexpected bill in her inbox and sends over a friendly "?", it doesn't carry anywhere near the meaning that Bezos intends. If I got one, it'd mean something like, "Hey, this is odd. Do you know where it came from?" It is all about broader context.
Fortunately, I don't work for a manager who would send me just a "?", but if I did, it would go ignored. I think it would tickle me if they followed up with "?!".
Yep. It's become more of a "hey you, look at me" kind of thing for us with my '?' being a "yo, you've got my attention- what's up?" kind of response. It works this way for him and I, but I wouldn't expect it to be an inherent shorthand in any of my other relationships.
I think the other side of this is that some folks tend toward perfectionism in their writing, so in an atmosphere where writing standards are perceived as very high, people can spend way too much time and energy trying to put things in just the right way, when they otherwise could have gotten their ideas across in a few seconds using a "stream-of-consciousness" style that is more similar to casual conversation. It can become a huge time sink.
Also, if people feel like casual or "sloppy" communication will be judged negatively, they might often choose to say nothing at all instead of sharing half-baked ideas, which probably reduces organic creativity and innovation, even if it leads to fewer interruptions.
So while I get the point this post is making, there are costs on both sides here. And some of the worst downsides of the casual style (interruptions, in particular) can be minimized by adding more structure around sync vs. async communication, protected focus time, and using different mediums when appropriate.
>I think the other side of this is that some folks tend toward perfectionism in their writing...
People should go for the middle ground on Slack. If you miss a period, so what? But skipping all of them just to be "casual"? That induces a cognitive load on your reader that you shouldn't.
I agree, and disagree. Remember that context matters a ton. Are you posting in a company wide channel, or DM-ing you're close coworkers? Are you posting about an update, or just sharing something random to your team. All that plays into this more than the author expands on (he does quickly mention it in the last section). I think you just have to be a human, esp. in times where everyone is working from home. I think if you followed this advice in every channel, in every scenario, your company Slack culture would start to suffer a ton, and feel very cold (not that the author says that, just an FYI). This is good advice generally, don't get me wrong, but just be smart to when you apply it. Don't ruin your culture, and come off as a robot/cold person in every message you post.
Something the author didn't mention (or maybe it's simply a specific case but I think demands explicit mention) is that it lowers the barrier of entry for new employees.
I started a new job ~2 months ago and things that everyone thinks everyone understands I simply did not. These weren't documented acronyms but rather "socially understood" acronyms that meant each time I didn't understand something I had to message someone asking.
While onboarding the amount of times I message people asking for help is so much that it gets uncomfortable (for me, at least) so minimizing the acronyms would be super helpful.
As a counter-point, though, it could be that each culture/tribe needs their own language that only they can understand and it creates this feeling of comradery? Just a thought.
When you're new to a job everyone expects you to ask a million questions and not know what internal acronyms mean (although it would also be nice if they were documented). It'd be suspicious if a new employee didn't ask enough questions. It may be uncomfortable but you should never feel bad about it.
I personally start to struggle with this after the first year when the grace period to ask "stupid" questions is over.
I remember a quote from Blaise Pascal's (if my memory serves me right) letter going something like "apologies for the long letter, but I lack the time to make it shorter".
Not that I use Slack anymore, I use Discord at work...
I disagree with the details of this argument, the costs seem strawman ish. You quickly get used to writing styles, chat systems are an ongoing ecosystem and you adapt quickly.
What I would suggest is to try and make your messages self contained with context. Avoid private messaging and ask things on open channels, too much information is hidden away in private messages. Even if your question is really for a specific person. Seeing conversations helps build narratives and context for teams.
Punctuation, capital letters, proper spelling, etc. exist for a reason: They're a standardized set of tools for making our writing clearer and easier to read. In a professional setting, they also indicate a level of thoughtfulness and attention to detail. In my mind, at least.
If you can write clearly without using these tools or if you're writing in a situation where style is more important than clarity, fine. Go nuts.
If you just can't be bothered to make, like, five extra keypresses... C'mon, man.
I can't help but feel like the real point the author is trying (not very successfully) to communicate is the importance of considering how other people will interpret and understand your messages. This includes content (will they understand this acronym?), but also includes how they are likely to interpret the tone of your message. Punctuation, grammar, emojis, etc. help to communicate tone -- but that doesn't lend itself to a blanket "always use punctuation" statement. Being too formal can appear cold and aloof; being too informal can appear apathetic or unkind.
It's also important to consider the range of reactions. For those who understand an acronym, they likely won't even notice; for those who don't understand it, they risk losing face and potentially looking like an idiot when they have to ask what the acronym means. The "time saved" is helpful, sure, but considering how people will respond goes beyond "how much time will they spend asking a follow-up question?" and also includes "how will they feel if they don't understand this?"
* Posting in a highly-visible channel where most/if not all people will lack context. Treat it like an email and make sure it's punctually and grammatically correct.
* Posting in a team channel where the attitude is casual. Pump those messages out pretty much like you're talking them.
> this [this fast and loose style] interrupts more productive work and deters deep thinking
This doesn't mesh with how I feel toward Slack. Slack itself is the thing that's disrupting my productivity and deterring deeper thinking by pinging me all the time. When I open Slack, the vast majority of the time, I'm looking to express my point as clearly AND concisely as possible so I can get back to doing whatever it was, which is 99% of time more important. As a result I use (or don't use) grammatical conventions, capitalization, and emoji depending on the context of my message and what will allow me to get my entire message across the fastest, and hopefully correctly.
If I'm messaging the person I've pairing with all day, or if I'm coordinating with my team about who will pick up a story, I'm much less likely to give my message all the proper formatting. These people what I'm like and how I tend to communicate, and so I can rely on that prior knowledge to "cut corners" here and there. I'm also much, much more likely to use emoji because I can communicate my intentions and my "intonation" nearly instantly, without having to sit there and worry about wordsmithing my whole message.
That being said, if I'm message in a large public channel that perhaps has multiple teams or belongs to a team I don't normally interact with, I'll spend much more time wordsmithing and editing to make sure I'm following proper conventions - mostly for the sake of clarity.
It does make some very salient points (think about how others could misinterpret your message, expand acronyms/use them sparingly, write to your audience, etc.) but I think they bought a little bit too much into the "Slack has replaced email" argument. For me, the main benefit of Slack over email is the lowered barrier to entry to starting a conversation and the ability to keeping it flowing, and part of achieving that is being okay with lowering the standards of communication.
This post is confusing to me. It's titled "Or, a case for using punctuation in Slack", and then spends almost the rest of the post discussing the issue with acronyms/initialisms/shorthand.
I totally agree about shorthand. It can be unnecessarily ambiguous. But punctuation isn't related to acronyms, I don't think? As others have pointed out, punctuation over instant-messaging services can add meaning you don't intend. I generally don't capitalize the first letter of sentences or end messages with periods in IM applications.
If they had just named it "A case for avoiding use of shorthand in Slack", I'd 100% agree.
Here is a pet theory of mine: the quality of the discussion on an Internet forum is directly related to the quality of grammar and punctuation. HN scores excellently in this regard. But perhaps this is just my bias. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
From the WaPo article you linked, regarding a period at the end of a sentence:
> that's an indication that the text message period has taken on a life of its own. It is no longer just the correct way to end a sentence. It's an act of psychological warfare against your friends.
It's so bizarre that people perceive some nefarious intent because a sentence ends with a period.
It's not that it's nefarious, but because human language often relies so much on the tone of voice used, we've begun creating informal norms for how to get that across in text form. A period at the end of a short phrase gives it a flat intonation in many circles. Communication isn't as simple as proscribing by fiat how people ought to use a given medium, and pragmatism requires that we adapt to what the group does for clear communication.
Also from the WaPo article, the study surveyed “126 undergraduates”. While it's clear that many Silly Valley startups use undergraduate all-nighters as a model for their culture and code quality, that is by no means universal.
The best form of communication is ultimately based on the amount of shared context (Eg: acronyms), so it’s silly to create rules per the communication medium — slack, email, HN comments, etc. Even within a medium, a slack DM to a friend has very different shared context from a message to a company-wide channel. Being mindful of that, and communicating respectfully, regardless of the actual medium, is likely to be far more useful. Nothing special about Slack.
For me, respectful written communication also includes proper punctuation & capitalization — since it makes reading easier.
General chat: Proper punctuation. Keep sentences terse. Reply promptly. Leave no room for ambiguity.
Direct message: Often if a matter takes place outside of a public channel, it is because a duty or responsibility is being delegated to you or a sensitive subject is involved. One should take extra precaution to speak forthrightly to ease the recipient, but also take measures to be prompt and present.
Makes a world of difference.
The most important thing I've learned about online tone is that it's less about what you say and more about how you tell others to speak to you.
> The argument here is scoped to people who have some degree of mastery over the language but are being sloppy with their written communication, which is to say "careless and unsystematic; excessively casual".
I think there are some good points here for technical writing. But it's easy to forget how memorable playful communication can be.
E.g. a responding via haiku or something no-caps and full of enjambment, might be extremely memorable. (especially in a chat full of technical writing style).
Right. Where I'm from, lack of punctuation and capitalization indicates less serious discussion, irony, sarcasm, etc. A non-serious "mood". If someone starts using correct grammar (e.g. I instead of i, periods, commas for introductory phrases and splices) it's an indication of the serious "mood" and to start a more thoughtful discussion.
It's probably a good idea to tell people this instead of just assuming everyone knows... but it's kind of engrained in the culture of the communities I'm in.
Indeed, real-time chats are a horror. A blight that should be removed from the organized collaboration world.
I would rather use E-mail, if only there was a FidoNet-like culture of using it properly among the users and the E-mail client software authors (that would enable proper threading and include quoting only the particular parts you answer).
IMHO the best communication format is a HN-like comments thread.
The message effectively seems to be: "The only reason your shortcut is efficient is because it saves you time and effort, at the cost of other people's time and effort".
To which I say: "Duh!? What, you thought people who do it don't realise that's the case? That's exactly why they do it, even!".
This just goes back to the linguistic maxim, which (I am paraphrasing here) stipulates that the language is always a compromise between the convenience of the producer and the convenience of the consumer.
The more common context the producer and the consumer share, the less need there is for punctuation, spelling out abbreviations or other niceties.
Another reason for me to use punctuation, proper grammar, and more advanced vocabulary in Slack is purely personal: I enjoy writing, both as a creative endeavor and a social one.
I like to think that sometimes, my chat style gives others a little bit of break-think amidst all the rapid-fire.
Agreed. My mentor Charles taught me: "engineers are humans too, they deserve proper English, so write proper English in your code comments". This kind of empathy gave humanity and warmth to the NeXT and Apple products he worked on.
I think the title should be more general. This advice should not be scoped only to "in slack". It should be for any written communication that you actually care about.
The author missing another huge benefit: it will also help improve recall/precision when searching conversation history, especially if that search is 'smart'.
The care and thought you put into your writing, regardless of medium, says everything about how (and how much) you care and are thinking about your audience.
> this [this fast and loose style] interrupts more productive work and deters deep thinking
This doesn't mesh with how I feel toward Slack. Slack itself is the thing that's disrupting my productivity and deterring deeper thinking by pinging me all the time. When I open Slack, the vast majority of the time, I'm looking to express my point as clearly AND concisely as possible so I can get back to doing whatever it was, which is 99% of time more important. As a result I use (or don't use) grammatical conventions, capitalization, and emoji depending on the context of my message and what will allow me to get my entire message across the fastest, and hopefully correctly.
If I'm messaging the person I've pairing with all day, or if I'm coordinating with my team about who will pick up a story, I'm much less likely to give my message all the proper formatting. These people what I'm like and how I tend to communicate, and so I can rely on that prior knowledge to "cut corners" here and there.
I'm also much, much more likely to use emoji because I can communicate my intentions and my "intonation" nearly instantly, without having to sit there and worry about wordsmithing my whole message. Sure, sending "I'm done for the day" and "I'm done for the day <wave emoji>" mean the same thing, my hope is that by including the waving emoji it shows I'm not signing off out of frustration, but instead that I'm just at the end of my hours and it's time to log off. This is a bit of a contrived example, as I don't think hardly anyone would read the first message and think "they're mad", but I hope my argument is still clear.
That being said, if I'm message in a large public channel that perhaps has multiple teams or belongs to a team I don't normally interact with, I'll spend much more time wordsmithing and editing to make sure I'm following proper conventions - mostly for the sake of clarity.
The author does make some very salient points (think about how others could misinterpret your message, expand acronyms/use them sparingly, write to your audience, etc.), and as a whole I think erring on the side of more "professional" and "standardized" is always a safe bet, but I can't help but feel that they bought a little bit too much into the "Slack has replaced email" argument (not really his fault, that is how they like to market it). For me, the main benefit of Slack over email is the lowered barrier to entry to starting a conversation and the ability to keeping it flowing; part of achieving that is being okay with somwhat lowering the standards of communication.
Unrelated: I posted this comment and then tried to correct a typo, and the edit didn't go through. After I hit "Update" the page would just refresh and the text stayed the same. Anyone seen that before?
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. Exclamation points, commas, and question marks, great!
For abbreviations, it's simply know your audience. You should use them when everyone in the room knows them, but you have to think about that first before use. The step of thinking about it is a great mental step to add, but the article presents it more as a steadfast rule. Also, expanding them in parentheses can be a chance to educate your audience for the future even when you have people who don't know, like I'll do below :P
To me, the smallest point was actually the most interesting and valuable, and it was skated over entirely - communicating emotion and sentiment, particularly through emoji use. With WFH (Work From Home) especially, communicating emotion is very socially helpful. I've found a lot of engineers think "well I don't care/need so I'll skip the flowery additions for efficiency" and then leave many non-tech people and some engineering coworkers to decipher if this random slack ask is mad, passive aggressive, inquisitive, or a check-in. This has far worse effects longterm often than an unknown acronym.
Adding emojis can solve this, or if you don't like those, literally giving more social context in words can also do the trick. When we're talking in person, we always communicate emotion, even when it's not the primary purpose. I think many would do well to include that in their online messaging as well :)