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When sending text messages or during a chat on Facebook or WhatsApp, do you usually end your sentences with a full stop? If this is the case for you, it might be a good idea to start letting go of the impulse to punctuate what you write when using these services – and deliberately disregard holy grammar.
According to an article by Rachel Feltman, from The Washington Post, an investigation carried out by scientists at Binghamton University, in New York, concluded that individuals who end their sentences with periods – when chatting with their acquaintances through a computer or cell phone – are perceived as unfriendly beings and, because of this, the content of their text messages is considered insincere.
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As explained in the research, text messages are the most common form of communication on the internet, and the speed with which these messages are exchanged simulates a face-to-face conversation. For this reason, the research arose from the curiosity to know if the endpoint was capable of transmitting aspects present in oral communication, such as tone – friendly, sad, aggressive, etc. – facial expressions, gestures and the cadence of speech, for example.
To conduct the experiments, the scientists recruited a group of 126 college students and showed them a series of dialogue-formatted “conversations” written by hand and via text messages.
The content of the material used in these tests consisted of invitations followed by responses – the researchers noticed that, when those answers ended with a point, participants generally interpreted them as less sincere. However, the most curious thing is that this same effect was not recorded in handwritten notes, but exclusively in text messages.
The point of contention.
According to the researchers, it’s as if the full stop has taken on a life of its own in text messages – completely abandoning its traditional grammatical function. As they say, since this type of communication is devoid of the social and emotional data present in verbal conversations, people start using emoticons, sequences of letters that represent sounds – “lol” – and signs to make up for this lack of information.
In the case of the final point, in the words of the researchers, “it morphed into an act of psychological warfare against friends.” A subsequent study carried out by the same group of scientists points out that sentences ending with exclamation points lend an aura of sincerity to messages.
With all this information, it’s no surprise that schools will soon be dedicating a module of the subject of Spanish or language to “text messaging,” to instruct children in the arts of balancing the tone of an online conversation.
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