Image credit – The Guardian
In school we were taught to end our sentences with a full stop. When we speak, we also speak in sentences, so by that logic shouldn’t text messages be considered sentences as well? We suppose they are, but apparently ending a text message with a full stop is “wrong” as a recent study has found out.
This is according to a study conducted by a research team at the Binghamton University in which they found that if you were to end a text message with a full stop, you’ll actually run the risk of being perceived as being insincere. Apparently this is because we tend to try and find context within text messages, especially since text messages unlike face-to-face conversations, lack cues like eye contact, body language, tone, and etc.
According to the research leader Celia Klin, “When speaking, people easily convey social and emotional information with eye gaze, facial expressions, tone of voice, pauses and so on. People obviously can’t use these mechanisms when they are texting. Thus, it makes sense that texters rely on what they have available to them – emoticons, deliberate misspellings that mimic speech sounds and, according to our data, punctuation.”
We suppose to a certain extent that is true, which is why sometimes jokes made online might come across offensive to others since they won’t be able to hear our tone or hear what the joke might sound like if delivered in person, but what do you guys think? How many of you actually end your text messages with a full stop?
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