I’m tired of people reading text from me, interpreting emotions that don’t exist, then getting mad at me for it.
Reading in emotions to text to such an extent that normal punctuation is seen as a negative is rather juvenile.
No need to yell 😖
Damn how old is the average Lemmy user? The amount of people (allegedly) using and expecting perfect punctuation when texting scares me. I never put periods after one-liners except for nuance and if someone else does it looks weird. Depends on the person obviously, for example when my mom texts me I know I shouldnt put much thought into such details.
When my mom texts me, she signs every message lol.
-NotMyOldRedditName
My parents or rarely messaged folks precede a message by “Hey [my name],
<br>(Actual message content)”.It kinda tilts me as it’s a chat and not an email and I dislike the mixing of those two medium
I assume we’re all over 40.
Seems weird to me too, I first started texting around 2005 when I finally got a cell phone. When I saw full punctuation I felt like I was getting scolded.
Perhaps related, but when communicating over the radio (including via digital printing modes like RTTY) you have to declare that you’re done transmitting and yield the frequency to the other party. This is because your signal may fade, appearing to the other person like you stopped transmitting. This is the purpose of the ubiquitous “over” seen in movies and TV, though in ham circles you use the more casual “go ahead” or “back to you”.
I imagine a period sends the same message, but because you don’t have to manage turn-taking with texts the way you do on the radio the period can be seen as redundant because they already know you’re done speaking. So sending a period may seem like you’re emphasizing the finality of your message.
In radio, you signal the end of a contact (QSO) with “out”, but again, in ham circles you just say “73”.
Is any of this relevant? I have no idea I’ve been up since 1 AM this morning.
I’ve never heard of OP’s convention. But if I had to guess, it’s this:
-
It’s slow to input text on an onscreen keyboard compared to a physical one.
-
Mobile vendors try to reduce the number of keystrokes via predictive text and other tweaks in their onscreen keyboard software.
-
One common optimization (which I do not like and have off) is to try to reduce the effort to terminate a a sentence.
-
On iOS’s keyboard, tapping space twice inserts a period, then space. This is an easy action to perform.
-
I would assume that many iOS users are thus trained to only terminate sentences this way, and not to explicitly use periods. A trailing period requires extra effort and an unusual keystroke.
-
As a result, iOS users tend not to put in the extra effort, and so their sentences tend not to have a trailing period if not followed by a subsequent sentence.
-
For these users, the norm then becomes to omit a period on the final sentence, and so explicitly adding it looks like the user has gone out of their way to specially add punctuation. The trailing period then acquires semantic value, meaning.
I expect that the whole thing stemmed from some random engineer at Apple just banging away trying to get average typing speed up, not spending a lot of time thinking about any linguistic or social impact.
It could also be that Microsoft or Google do that by default — but I don’t use their default onscreen keyboards, and the descriptions I can find online of their default behavior sounds like they don’t.
My Galaxy S25 does the double space inserts a period thing, even with as much predictive text as I can disabled.
Duck Duck Go’s AI suggestion is:
To enable the double space period feature on the Samsung keyboard, go to Settings > General Management > Language and input > On-screen keyboard > Samsung Keyboard > Smart typing, and ensure that the “Auto spacing” option is turned on. If the feature is not working, you may need to reset the keyboard settings to default or clear the keyboard’s cache.
EDIT: This (presumably) human, about older versions of the Galaxy:
https://www.techbone.net/samsung/user-manual/auto-punctuate
Tap on Settings
Tap on General management
Tap on Samsung Keyboard settings
Tap on More typing options
Enable or disable Double tap space bar to add period
-
I think it is honestly really pathetic that so many of you claim to love language and yet what you really love is having a rigid form of interaction that you can shame people for not perfectly following or reacting intuitively to.
Language is ALWAYS a negotiation, if you dismiss people that interpret your sentences without a period as passive-aggressive, YOU are the one that loses because you have undermined the basic premise of communicating with others in favor of the comforting idea that there are a perfect set of unchanging abstract rules that can be applied to communication that delineate a “correct” way to do things.
There are no rules to language, language is not decided by a committee, language is a living breathing thing that does not give a fuck about your condescending attempt to lock it in stone and direct it towards being used as a tool to shame others with.
You don’t get to decide what people react to and don’t react to in your language.
If people react poorly to correct grammar that’s on them not me.
Saving this for the next time I could you use scathing takedown.
As the other person says it’s the same with new words and people looking down on the next generation like theirs didn’t do the same. I love that language evolves, always something to learn. Better than shouting at clouds, which should be Lemmy’s tagline.
Yes! Preach! Same with new words. Every generation gets angry with the next generation using new words but you don’t get to decide how I use words. I will adhere to certain rules so we can keep understanding each other but all the members of the commission will have to be willing to rewrite the rules if the language has changed.
Thank you! It’s sad this comment is so far down. This has been one of the most confusing group of responses I’ve read on the fediverse so far. So many angry and unmovable people who sound like they don’t communicate with humans.
I’m glad that full stops are now passive aggressive, because that’s been my intent all along.
OK.
K.
“K” works best without a period. It is literally the lowest effort acknowledgement possible while ensuring that you contribute absolutely nothing in return.
K
A lot of arguing one way or the other here but when my wife starts ending texts with periods I know im fucked.
So “full stop” means a Period, right? A period is a period, PERIOD. That’s all it is. It ends a sentence, so you start a new one. It doesn’t contain any emotional ammunition. It certainly isnt passive aggressive, that’s just stupid.
What’s next? Are we going to start debating the tyranny of the comma, or the righteous indignation of the semi-colon?
Or maybe we should be debating the infiltration of our written communications by Big Emoji? They’re obviously behind all of this, trying to encourage more emoji use, to stuff their coffers with that sweet emoji revenue.
Calm the fuck down, people.
It’s really only a “full stop” when it’s the last or only sentence, not just any sentence with a period. It’s related to phones only adding the period if you hit space twice. So by default, single sentences never have it because you don’t continue typing. So actually putting it in is intentional for many people and they are in fact making a statement akin to “this is my final word on the matter”.
It’s the difference between
“Can you help me with this?” “No”
And
“Can you help me with this?” “No.”
That extra “.” after “No” wasn’t strictly necessary, so by including it on purpose, you’re making a statement. That’s the general thought process going on with people who find it passive aggressive.
You can also go back even further to T9 typing and texting shorthand and see that punctuation was largely ignored due to message size limitations and difficulties typing on a phone in general. It’s something that has evolved over time due to the medium. The main issue is people who have gone through this transition see it one way, and people who are used to more formal writing suddenly joining the internet see it another way. I would say it’s more like regional accents. Both are correct depending on context.
The only reason your phone doesn’t add the punctuation in for you like it does the automatic capitalization of the first letter is because it can’t tell when you’ve finished your complete thought.
I’ll never let lazy cunts tell me I’m being passive aggressive for using goddamn proper punctuation. I’ll be actively aggressive about that.
You know they’re exactly the same thing right ? Only north americans use the term “period”.
Old English used stops liberally, they were used in place of commas and semi-colons as well, it was called a full stop at the end of the sentence.
Nope, you end a sentence with period. Period. That’s just basic punctuation, like starting a sentence with a capital letter.
Look, I explained how it developed and why it’s used that way. I also explained the difference between a “full stop” and a “period”. If your reading comprehension is that terrible, maybe don’t get involved in discussions about linguistics because it clearly went right over your simple minded little head.
I have excellent reading comprehension skills, and I understand everything you wrote, and I stand by my response.
And I said it without being a prick, too.
No, you were a prick who talked past them.
They very clearly and calmly explained the dynamics of both sides of this debate, and you responded by inanely reiterating your original point which they obviously already understood.
You really didnt
Looking at the responses. This post is ragebait lnao
Everything on the Internet is rage bait. Take your lame edgy take elsewhere. We’re here for the debate.
Correcting people’s gammar has always been a surprisingly contentious issue.
gammar
That’s bait
I said nothing about spelling, lol.
It does.
There’s actually a name for people who perceive proper punctuation as being passive aggressive. They’re called “morons.”
Edit: in the name of further research I asked my wife, who is a non-punctuation texter, what she thought about this. Here’s what I got.
Results of Conversation with Mrs. jubilationtcornpone
Me: “If someone sent you a message that had a period at the end, would you think they were angry with you?”
Her: “Like now? No. When I was younger? Yes.”
Me: “Why would you think that when you were younger?”
Her: “Hmmm. I don’t really know. I guess because women tend to read between the lines, even if there’s nothing there. And because people like to have something to complain about and little miscommunications are an easy target.”
Me: “Ok. So why doesn’t it bother you now?”
Her: “Probably because I met you and you always use punctuation. You know <mutual friends husband>? She knows when he’s mad at her just based on specific words he uses in texts or just the way he says something.”
Me: “So if you start using punctuation, I should be concerned?”
Her: “Like if I say “I’m fine.” With a period and everything?”
Me: “Yes.”
Her: “Yeah. That means I’m not fine.”
Me: “That’s a lot of pressure to put on a period.”
Her: “True.”
Me: “But you already know I’m going to infer nothing from that. I probably won’t even notice.”
Her: “Yeah. I know. That’s why l would just tell you.”
Me: “Fair enough.”
Her: “You’re just one of those people who says exactly what they mean. There’s no cryptic message or anything.”
Me: “That’s what I’m talking about!”
Her: “It is kind of nice actually.”
What is “proper punctuation”? Isn’t it context dependent?
Not every instance of written language is written in complete sentences.
A sign that says “SALE” is normal, but a sign that says “Sale.” would be unusual, maybe some kind of marketing or design choice.
Social convention around IMs and chat rooms in the early versions of live chat, in the 90’s, capitalization and punctuation were not ordinarily used. Multiple sentences per message were also not the norm.
Text messages have always been somewhere between 90’s style IMs (uncapitalized and unpunctuated phrases, not full sentences) and a full email message (full salutations and signatures). The convention depends on the context, and autocorrect has changed what is or isn’t normal.
So a text message response that says “that’s fine” conveys a distinct message from one that says “That’s fine.”
That’s how human communication works. Trying to start every text message with “Dear Jake,” and ending it with “Sincerely, Raymond Holt” would be weird.
That weirdness is, of course, the whole joke about Holt starting and ending his texts that way.
At the end of the day, despite my spending way too much time in this thread defending the mandatory use of periods, I have to admit that it doesn’t really matter how you write a text to your friends.
But proper grammar is important when you need to communicate clearly with a large audience who might not be aware of the colloquialisms and informal conventions you’re used to and it’s better to have a strict system of rules to make sure everyone can understand. Which is why primary and secondary schools teach the English language and an overall decline in literacy is cause for concern.
So yeah, context is important, but there are many contexts where proper grammar is required.
No, they’re called people who know how to write, as the point of writing is to communicate ideas and emotions, not to be a pedant about ever changing rules.
The rule hasn’t changed.
There may be an informal convention among some people that using a period at the end of the last sentence in a text is passive aggressive, but it’s far from universal and far from being a rule.
Seems like it’s just as pedantic to expect people who have habitually used correct punctuation for decades to adopt this convention without ever being told and then blaming them for not abandoning an immensely useful part of written language for no apparent reason.
Idk, but this definitely isn’t new. I’m 31 and have been removing periods from texts for a decade to help convey tone. It’s like how women use (over use?) exclamation points in emails, because periods come across as aggressive and curt. The same is true in text, but instead of exclamation points, I’m able to just leave a sentence without punctuation so it doesn’t come across as angry, annoyed, or frank.
This has been well documented for a long time, but true media literacy dictates you try to ignore these rules in texts from Gen X and Boomers, otherwise they’re going to come across as very rude over text with their periods and ellipses.
You eventually restated my point. It’s a convention used among a portion of the population, documented in articles and studies, but not taught or a part of formal grammar.
At some point a set of fairly strict rules is important for a written language, as your point with Gen X and Boomers helps to illustrate, because it makes sure you can be understood by a broader audience when clarity is required. Punctuation is a fundamental part of that.
Omitting periods in text is a technilogical colloquialism. I’m not arguing that. But that doesn’t mean, as the poster that I first replied to implied, that people who omit periods from texts are the only ones who “know how to write”.
Over-use of exclamation points is another poor habit, since they can mark something that’s important regardless of it being a positive or negative. With quoted speech it could be something that’s either angry or joyful. Using them to convey a non-threatening tone shouldn’t be required. I get that it is in some cases, and I belive that indicates a problem with our overall literacy and a renewed misogyny in the workplace.
Whether this is a result of the medium of communication or a decline in literacy is up for debate, but word choice and context should do the bulk of conveying tone and relying on punctuation for that purpose understandably looks like an indicator of poor literacy.
At some point a set of fairly strict rules is important for a written language
Given that English has become the lingua franca without having a strict set of rules, reality would say otherwise. If a strict set of rules was that important then French would be the most commonly used language.
Over-use of exclamation points is another poor habit, since they can mark something that’s important regardless of it being a positive or negative. With quoted speech it could be something that’s either angry or joyful. Using them to convey a non-threatening tone shouldn’t be required. I get that it is in some cases, and I belive that indicates a problem with our overall literacy and a renewed misogyny in the workplace.
You realize that its just you who’s having problems? You are claiming that other people have literacy problems, when they communicate with each other just fine, and it’s you who are struggling to communicate effectively. They are not having problems with being misinterpreted, just you are.
Whether this is a result of the medium of communication or a decline in literacy is up for debate, but word choice and context should do the bulk of conveying tone and relying on punctuation for that purpose understandably looks like an indicator of poor literacy.
No, people insist on strict rules so that they don’t have to change or learn new things, and can blame other people when they communicate poorly. The English language constantly changes, and authors constantly break the “rules” that your elementary school teacher taught you to effectively communicate ideas. That has literally always been the case, from Shakespeare, through Cormack McCarthy, to the past several decades of online communication.
You seem to think a centralized style and grammar book like the French have is the only way to have strict set of grammatical rules.
An overwhelming number of English textbooks and stylebooks agree on the use of a period. We’re not talking about something esoteric here, it’s how you end a sentence. Omitting them is poor writing. Claiming artistic licence or understandability doesn’t change that in the vast majority of cases. I’m not calling those who omit them baby-killers or anything. It’s just poor writing that people have grown accustomed to seeing.
Writers like McCarthy, Twain, and Joyce have the chops to communicate exceptionally well despite breaking these rules, not just because they broke them. The people in the office next to yours mangling emails don’t.
And literacy rates are on the decline in the US. Take that however you will.
The rule hasn’t changed.
Can you point me to this institution that decides on the rules of the English language? What’s it’s address? Where does it publish these rules?
There may be an informal convention among some people that using a period at the end of the last sentence in a text is passive aggressive, but it’s far from universal and far from being a rule.
It is a natural result of reading both versions, noticing that one sounds more formal and has a sharp ending, and noticing that since you can write either one, if they’re ending it sharply they must be doing so intentionally. If you use the full availability of communication options available, it inherently sends that signal, if you follow rules for the sake of following rules though, then it limits that option so doesn’t send that signal.
Seems like it’s just as pedantic to expect people who have habitually used correct punctuation for decades to adopt this convention without ever being told and then blaming them for not abandoning an immensely useful part of written language for no apparent reason.
You had literally decades to adjust and change, this isn’t new, it’s been the case since at least the early 00s when cell phones and instant messengers became a thing.
You first.
YOU made the initial claim about this “new” meaning, onus is therefore on you to substantiate it.
For my defense, I’ll start with Elements of Style, the OECD, and any other English dictionary or grammar book.
Because if you really want to play “who has the best evidence for their case”, you’re gonna lose to several hundred years, and millions of written documents.
So you’ll point to a variety of different and conflicting sources?
The English language naturally evolves over time. You getting butthurt about improving your communication style accomplishes nothing.
Show me where those sources conflict on the use of a period.
Show me where they state that their rules are meant for informal communication.
You learned this shit at school. Did you think your teacher was making it up on the fly?
At school they teach you common rules of thumb for the English language, and formal writing styles for communicating in academic settings. Famously, and unlike French, the English language does not have hard set rules, and book writers constantly break the ones you’re taught in elementary school to more effectively communicate their ideas, or speak in a desired voice.
Literally, read a fucking book.
If somone struggles to understand what someone else means if they use proper punctuation, that sounds like illiteracy.
If someone struggles with understanding context, they are probably a sea beast.
If you insist on interpreting my use of punctuation in a text as anything other than an effort to communicate clearly, I’m likely to start being passive aggressive at some point.
…but how should I interpret your passive aggressiveness if I should interpret your use of punctuation as no more than an effort to communicate clearly?
It’s fine, I don’t care
I’ll just do it the way everyone else wants to, I guess I don’t need to use periods, not like my opinion matters anyway
“Ah, an em-dash. You must be an AI.”
Anyone holding this view can get in the sea
Equally moronic as saying the letter “e” is passive aggressive
It’s not that EVERY full stop is passive aggressive, it’s about interpreting tone.
So for example, when I text my parents and say, “Thank you for the invite, we’d be happy to come over for dinner next Monday!” and my dad replies, “Great.” That looks passive aggressive.
He doesn’t mean it that way, tone interpretation from short texts just isn’t something he’s fluent in like those of us who’ve been texting (or IMing back before texts) most of our lives.
If he had said “Great” that would be fine, as would “Great!” But “Great.” is interpreted as sarcastic and/or passive aggressive.
and my dad replies, “Great.” That looks passive aggressive
What about it makes it look passive aggressive? How would excluding punctuation make it not look passive aggressive?
It’s the explicit inclusion of period where ‘normally’ there wouldn’t be one. In texting or DMs it would normally be assumed that one-liners wouldn’t contain punctuation except to enhance effect, so the inclusion of the full stop is being read as a 😐 or exaggerated neutrality
It’s the explicit inclusion of period where ‘normally’ there wouldn’t be one.
But given the larger history of textual communication, full punctuation is normal. Texting isn’t charged per character so it’s not like there’s a benefit to leaving it out.
Texting used to be done with a number pad, so going as far as adding a period used to be a statement. Obviously we all have keyboards now, but I’m sure some of that still translates over to today.
Fair point, for T9 typing I can see that. I wouldn’t expect millennials and zennials to have dealt with T9 much, though.
Texting isn’t charged per character anymore, and only in most places most of the time. And those habits may still persist in other places. My manner of ‘speech’ is very different in front of a keyboard vs on a phone, for instance.
Leaving out unnecessary characters makes you type faster, that’s also why people write u instead of you sometimes
For those of us who learned to type, typing u instead of you will take longer because of muscle memory. I’m using glide typing on a phone for this and I still had to slow down to type u instead of you.
Well you’re used to writing “you” instead of “u” while texting (for the record, I also always write “you”). Similiarly, a lot of people (namely those who grew up with phones), are used to omitting full stops at the end of a message, so if someone does it it must be a conscious decision. See where I’m going with this? (Also it’s not like people who use them are immediately sounding passive-aggressive, context matters)
My phone keyboard adds so many unwanted periods, sometimes between every word.
I use Anysoft Keyboard on Android, and it has a toggle for that behavior, which I have off. I don’t know which software keyboard you’re using, but you might check whether it has such a toggle.
dude/ette
read some fukan poetry OK thanks
If poetry text
Is how you commune with friends
Passive aggressive.edit: fixed the formatting, and my keyboard unironically took my double-tap on space to add periods for me! 😅
Does Lemmy need the double space? This isn’t Reddit after all, and it’s the only Markdown implementation I’ve seen with that requirement for line breaks.
and my keyboard unironically took my double-tap on space to add periods for me!
Markdown also permits a trailing backslash to be a linebreak, as an alternative to the two trailing spaces.
foo\ baryields
foo
barNo, baron, I was just pointing out that there are lots of different rules depending on the medium and genre and participants. le sigh
I don’t know anything about texting then. I would have been happy they responded.
What about it makes it look passive aggressive?
Good question!
As I explained later in the post, “Great.” looks like sarcasm. My brain interprets it as having a sarcastic tone, and thus being passive aggressive.
(I am not alone in this, hence the very thing we’re commenting on.)
How would excluding punctuation make it not look passive aggressive?
You might as well ask why tone of voice changes the way we interpret things. Written short-form communication has evolved cultural norms that some people understand better than others, just like spoken communication. Chalk my tone interpretation up to an adolescence spent on IRC.
My point is that the full stop being passive aggressive is contextual. None of my uses of it here are intended to portray passive aggression or sarcasm, and if I wanted to do that I would not only change my sentence length and structure, but also my vocabulary.
But of course these norms aren’t as readily understood as actual tone of voice, which is why things like “/s” can be useful.
First off, thanks for humoring me.
As I explained later in the post, “Great.” looks like sarcasm. My brain interprets it as having a sarcastic tone, and thus being passive aggressive. (I am not alone in this, hence the very thing we’re commenting on.)
I get that it’s a common interpretation amongst a demographic.
You might as well ask why tone of voice changes the way we interpret things
Eh, vocal changes carry actual physical changes in the sound waves which non-hearing-impaired persons can perceive, so I don’t quite think it’s an apt comparison. But I understand your intent in doing so.
But of course these norms aren’t as readily understood as actual tone of voice, which is why things like “/s” can be useful.
Precisely why it seems odd to me to interpret the use of the basic of punctuation whose literary meaning hasn’t ever carried an absence of express indicator of emotional intent to be negative.
Again, thanks for engaging with me on it, even though I still don’t get it.
I think it is because short form texts like IMs/SMS/irc are more like spoken language than written language. And if somebody talks to you and ends a sentence with “period”, the meaning/feeling of the sentence changes.
It also depends so much on context. My dad texting “Great.” in that text would be different than me texting my work friend:
Them: Paul called out again
Me: great.
I can see how someone literally putting the word “period” at the of a sentence gives it a certain tone. But the meaning of a period is that the sentence is ended.
Yes. Correct. Accurate.
Wow. What a good question.
Thanks.
In my mind, the full stop “sounds” like dropping the voice at the end, like you do at the end of a sentence.
And in speech, dropping the voice at the end of “Great” would sound sarcastic.Whereas an exclamation mark “sounds” high-pitched and excited.
And no punctuation is so normal in text that my mind “adds” the expected sign at the end, which after “Great” would be an exclamation mark.
It’s really hard to explain, I hope I’m making sense.
I would be far more likely to interpret someone I didn’t know who texted great without a period to be sarcastic.
It seems like deviation from their normal pattern would have some meaning, but without context all of these could be read as sarcastic depending on what kind of reaction someone might be expecting.
great
great.
great!
The fact that their dad was (possibly?) raised in an era when children were taught to read and write correctly is what makes it passive aggressive…
and just laziness inculcated by Internet/mobile/meme culture.
it’s about interpreting tone.
Kinda feels passive aggressive, idk man
That’s silly, and at the very least probably gonna cause unconscious bias to second language speakers, neurodivergent people & just anyone who doesn’t communicate via text as much as we do
That’s silly
I don’t know what to tell you, communication is complicated. A lot of this is subconscious.
and at the very least probably gonna cause unconscious bias to second language speakers, neurodivergent people & just anyone who doesn’t communicate via text as much as we do
I agree, which is why it’s important for us to understand context and to attempt to interpret what the other person says in the best light.
I didn’t think my dad was actually being sarcastic when he replied that way. His text conveyed a tone he didn’t intend, just like when my neurodivergent ass says something in a tone of voice harsher than I intend.
This is no different from spoken communication, except there we get additional clues about neurodivergence and/or linguistic familiarity.
I didn’t think my dad was actually being sarcastic when he replied that way. His text conveyed a tone he didn’t intend, just like when my neurodivergent ass says something in a tone of voice harsher than I intend.
Both of those are people inferring meaning that isn’t there. I would bet money you didn’t say stuff in a tone of voice harsher than you meant, they just didn’t like what you were saying and read way too much into it.
The boomer triple period is even worse.
Thank you for the invite, we’d be happy to come over for dinner next Monday!
Great…
My dad does that a lot, and it’s so weird to me
If he does it when he is excited you might let him know about exclamation marks.
Maybe he is trying to be sarcastic.
Nope, just his normal way of talking.
Read an article a while back which explained why they probably do it, and while I don’t think it’s the one I read back than this one does a pretty good job.
TLDR: for older generations it’s a way of separating thoughts most likely leftover from postcards, whereas for the younger ones it looks like something is being (ominously) left out.
I disagree with your entire take.
If you interpret “Great.” as “passive aggressive”, you are nuts. It simply is correct grammar, something kids seem to be unaware of nowadays.
Everyone in this thread that can’t understand how a period can be passive aggressive just reminds me of Sheldon from Big Bang Theory. They are so focused on what the rules strictly mean, that they can’t detect the nuance of how people actually communicate.
The different context means it’s not a literary communication, but notation for casual speech.
More script or score than Strunk and White.
In that mode, punctuation is performative, and with a period after one word you should weigh heavily on a grim tone of voice, or perhaps sarcasm.
As an old fart and former editor, context is key: there are many modes of expression, and the rules vary.
Punctuation is context dependent, and it’s wild just how much of this thread has commenters who are purposely being obtuse about it.
Punctuation on promotional signs is weird. We expect words like “SALE” and “CLEARANCE” and “25% OFF” not to have periods.
Punctuation on newspaper headlines is weird. The AP Style Manual has all sorts of rules and conventions about headline language, and it’s different from normal written language.
Punctuation on titles of artistic, literary, or musical works is weird. When Kendrick Lamar released “DAMN.” the period in the title was part of an artistic choice.
And yeah, the idea that people can only text in complete sentences is absurd and differs from the norms of that medium since its beginning. Starting a conversation with “Hey.” is different from starting a conversation with “hey” and people pretending they don’t get why is kinda puzzling to me.
It simply is correct grammar, something kids seem to be unaware of nowadays.
What a boomer take. I could just as well say that the “kids” seem to be more aware of the use of punctuation in text messaging and the implied emotion they convey
If you were aware of the use of punctuation, you would use it correctly, not like a kid that failed in school.
Ok boomer
In what way is that passive agressive? That is so weird. I simply ignore tone on the internet or texts. There is not any. Just words. They said great it means great. That’s it.
And I have been sending messages most of my life, and it is a simple rule: there is no tone in texts or messages.
It’s not that EVERY full stop is passive aggressive, it’s about interpreting tone.
If he had said “Great” that would be fine, as would “Great!” But “Great.” is interpreted as sarcastic and/or passive aggressive.
Ok, zoomer.
I don’t think the issue is his fluency in interpreting tone but you’re just interpreting it differently. In this case you’re misinterpreting it since he didn’t mean to be passive aggressive
I’m not saying that’s the interpretation I walked away with. Context is important. I knew my dad wasn’t being sarcastic, just read that way. It made me laugh, it made my wife laugh!
It’s like back when some people didn’t realize all caps meant yelling and they would go around with caps lock on until they had it explained to them.
Every time universal signs of people being passive aggressive is explained to me the person who thinks these tiny signs like the exact way someone interacts mean it is passive aggressive they are wrong.
All of the examples apply to either individuals or a specific subset of people. I have relatives who do one thing that is passive aggressive, but when everyone else does the same thing they are just interacting normally. Saying that the shit those relatives do is always a sign of being passive aggressive is not true, it is only in the context of those relatives and other people who might be passive aggressive in the same way.
So for example, when I text my parents and say, “Thank you for the invite, we’d be happy to come over for dinner next Monday!” and my dad replies, “Great.” That looks passive aggressive.
Ugh, that is reading way too fucking much into how someone types text. Maybe it reads that way because it stands out as different from the normal way he types, but if he always ends with a period it would look completely normal!
deleted by creator
Where periods?
You don’t have to use them
Just don’t go making stuff up about people’s intentions when they do
This is a stupid rule and I will continue to ignore it.
Uh, just in general, people tend to react horrifically to long messages, ‘walls of text’.
… even on discussion boards, like here on lemmy, or as a first intro message to someone on some kind of dating app/site.
I’ve been using the internet since the mid 90s.
It did not used to be like this.
People thought of messages as letters, like emails.
Now, a lot of people will get viscerally angry or disgusted in basically nearly any digital context if you send a message that’s longer than roughly double the original Twitter character limit.
Hooray for normalizing slogans and soundbites in lieu of actual discourse, hooray for kicking off the trend of destroying our collective capacity to read multiple paragraphs at a time, great job Dorsey.
It’s very in line with Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves To Death and the idea that the medium itself shapes communication and public discourse.
People seem not just unwilling, but at times unable to tolerate any sort of discussion that’s long enough to get into the real nuance of an issue. Postman blamed the news, especially TV news, and an over reliance on TV/Video as means to convey information (though he actually supported TV as entertainment). But he also cautioned against the risk centralizing what he referred to then as “computing” in a way that seem to almost prophesize what’s currently happening with social media and AI.
I guess ‘wall of text’ is something different for me than for you, or those you speak of here. For me, it’s when the long text has no newlines or paragraphs, making it inaccessible and hard to read or scan.
I mean, there’s always gonna be some variability as to how people understand terms, and I personally lean much more toward your understanding, where its a uh…
Its more reminiscent of an ancient slab of greek or roman text, just, all letters, no spaces, no punctuation, ie, terribly formatted by modern english standards.
But, what I’m trying to describe is more of … a visceral anger or mockery at the concept that someone would read more than about a single paragraph.
Its happening because people’s brains are ‘adapting’ to the short form, brainrot mode of modern social media.
Everything is a clipshow.
If its longer than a clip, its boring, and or excruciating to attempt to parse, for people conditioned by things like TikTok.
Its happening because people’s brains are ‘adapting’ to the short form, brainrot mode of modern social media.
This is what I feared way back when Twitter first gained popularity. I couldn’t get into it, because the short character limit made it impossible to explain pretty much anything.
Anyway, I’m with you on this. If you’ve got something important or novel to share, it’s probably going to take some explanation to convey it. Short-form social media leads to shallow conversations. I like depth, I like exploring others’ perspectives, and it takes more than 160 characters (or whatever the limits are now) to really reach some subjects.
I say this as someone with unmedicated ADHD - modern people’s attention spans are depressing. I still love watching documentaries that are 2+ hours long, even when YouTube tries to push for 30-second clips of garbage. Thank goodness for Lemmy and Mastodon, offering us the chance to really dive deep into conversations that most social media want to clip short.
Yep.
Its why I never used Twitter.
Well, beyond creating an account when Elon basically accidentally bought it, to scream at him, untill in all likelihood, he personally banned me.
Twitter took off because celebrities and primarily Democrat politicians joined an used it as essentially a microblogging/messaging system.
Our first social steps into modern parasociality.
They were of course eventually more or less thoroughly routed and out-influenced by hordes of right wing 4 chan trolls, who were much, much more adept at understanding how information flow actually works on the internet.
… anyway, yeah, i more or less see lemmy and piefed and mastadon as the last sort of… strung together set of rafts, floating amidst a sea of corporate sponsored, literal insanity, at this point.
I’ve been using the internet since the mid 90s.
It did not used to be like this.
A high proportion of people on the Internet in the mid-90s were associated with tech or universities and were comparatively well-educated. It was not a representative slice of society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Eternal September or the September that never ended was a cultural phenomenon during a period beginning around late 1993 and early 1994, when Internet service providers began offering Usenet access to many new users.[1][2] Before this, the only sudden changes in the volume of new users of Usenet occurred each September, when cohorts of university students would gain access to it for the first time, in sync with the academic calendar.
The flood of new and generally inexperienced Internet users directed to Usenet by commercial ISPs in 1993 and subsequent years swamped the existing culture of those forums and their ability to self-moderate and enforce existing norms. AOL began their Usenet gateway service in March 1994, leading to a constant stream of new users.[3] Hence, from the early Usenet community point of view, the influx of new users that began in September 1993 appeared to be endless.
During the 1980s and early 1990s, Usenet and the Internet were generally the domain of dedicated computer professionals and hobbyists; new users joined slowly, in small numbers, and learned to observe the social conventions of online interaction without having much of an impact on the experienced users.
The only exception to this was September of every year, when large numbers of first-year university students gained access to the Internet and Usenet through their university campuses. These large groups of new users who had not yet learned online etiquette created a nuisance for the experienced users, who came to dread September every year.
And that’s just college freshmen.
Internet access today is more universally-available. I’d say that it’s just a product of seeing society as a whole writing.
A lot of what people read in, say, the 1980s was from mass media. That generally had a journalist — a professional dedicated to writing — and an editor checking their work. Those people probably had gone to college specifically to pick up writing skills, and likely spent a large portion of their professional lives writing. They had a high level of expertise relative to the population as a whole in that field. Now what you’re reading is often without that filter. It’s not that people in society changed. It’s that you’d never seen society’s writing; you’d just been reading what experts put out.
It’d be like most of what you’d seen your whole life was furniture created by professional carpenters, and then suddenly every Tom, Dick, and Harry was creating their own furniture.
I remember staring at YouTube comments when YouTube first came out and thinking “good God, these are terrible”. Randall Munroe, who clearly had the same reaction, did a whole cartoon about it:
https://lemmy.today/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fimgs.xkcd.com%2Fcomics%2Fyoutube.png
The answer, of course, isn’t that YouTube users are unusual. It’s that the people who watch videos are more-representative of society than those who are writing and reading long-form text on Usenet or whatnot. That comes as a sudden and abrupt shock if you’re used to reading that Usenet stuff. That is, you’d been in a bubble, and that bubble went away.
Randall worked at NASA. If you work at NASA and are accustomed to conversation among a bubble of what people who work at NASA say about space and then abruptly get thrown into an environment where people who don’t work at NASA are talking about space, I expect that it’s pretty shocking.
I remember also reading about what happened when email entered into businesses. It kind of mirrored this. For a long time, it was kind of expected that executives would have a secretary, because doing things like typing wasn’t as widespread a skill and correcting errors on a typewriter was more time-consuming than it is today on a computer. A manager would likely at least get access to some sort of shared secretary, even if they didn’t merit a personal one. That secretary likely spent a lot of their professional life writing, and got to be pretty good at it. That secretary was probably a lot better at writing than the typical person out there. Then businesses generally decided that with email, a lot of this dedicated-secretary overhead wasn’t necessary, and arranged to have people just write their own memos. They promptly discovered that a lot of people high up in their org charts had very little ability to write understandably (probably in part because they’d been relying on secretaries to clean everything up for years), and for some years after email showing up in businesses, having training to remediate this was apparently something of a thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretarial_pool
A secretarial pool or typing pool is a group of secretaries working at a company available to assist any executive without a permanently assigned secretary. These groups have been reduced or eliminated where executives have been assigned responsibility for writing their own letters and other secretarial work.
After the widespread adoption of the typewriter but before the photocopier and personal computer, pools of typists were needed by large companies to produce documents from handwritten manuscripts, re-type documents that had been edited, type documents from audio recordings, or to type copies of documents.
Is all this a bad thing?
Well…the Internet has democratized communication. It means that everyone has a voice. It’s got pros and cons. It’s changed how politicians communicate (Trump being a good example). It means that it’s easier to get material out there, but that the material doesn’t have a filter on it that might have been useful.
I think that it might well be the case that the average person today probably writes a lot more than they did in the past, because electronic communication enables written text to be so-readily and quickly transmitted. I’d wager that the average level of writing experience is higher today than in 1995. It’s just that you’re seeing a higher proportion of Average Joe’s writing than Jane the Journalist’s writing than you might have in 1995.
The internets had a couple of shifts, the biggest and most recent in the 2010s when internet started getting common on cellphones. A whole crap ton of people who’d never really interneted before were suddenly thrust into it.
I was under the age of 10, for most of the 90s.
I am the most ‘unsupervised internet access as a child’ person I know, lol.
I just really really like computers, hahaha!
… I also am arguably even worse than the ‘eternal september’, lol, as I hadn’t even gone through puberty when I first started talking to people online, via forums or AIM or mIRC or Ventrilo or what not.
But as far as writing experience goes… you’re correct for a small subset of hyperliterate people, but generally your conclusion at this end is wrong.
Americans, American adults read and write at an average of a 5th grade level.
Around 15% of adults read and write at a 2nd grade level, functional illiteracy.
Something like less than 5% of American adults can read multiple news articles about the same topic, and compare and contrast the way they’re differently presented, to determine bias and missing or emphasized details, differing framing, etc.
When I went to college, this was referred to as having a collegiate level of literacy, post 12th grade literacy.
Well, how many American adults have a bachelors degree or better, and have an accompanying collegiate level of literacy?
Roughly 38% have a 4 year degree or better.
Yet only about 5% of them can actually do critical analysis.
So, roughly 87% of college degrees were given to people who did not actually learn how to think.
You don’t seem to understand how seriously the entire education system has already collapsed, how many college degrees are half comprised of what older, educated folks would just call remedial high school classes.
Our literacy numbers are comparable to those of what Trump refers to as ‘shithole countries’.
Thank you for the history lesson :D
People thought of messages as letters, like emails.
On IRC and ICQ and AIM? No, lowercase phrases without punctuation was the norm for short messages.
Text messages are closer to those old short messages (hence the name “short message service”) than to email.
Well no, IM has generally always defaulted to a norm of much shorter messages.
But… fairly lengthy forum posts?
Yeah, that used to be pretty common.
And it used to be normal that if someone posted ‘I ain’t readin’ all that’, they would be mocked.
Now, its the reverse.
And also… yeah I am still baffled by people whose response to … an introduction message, on some kind of dating app/site… is to just laugh at how long it is.
… I’d used OKCupid in its early days.
Generally?
If you took the time to actually read someone’s profile, and… write something, based on shared interests… that was … a good thing to do.
Shows that you actually care.
Now? Try to do the same thing?
Apparently people can’t comprehend that an initial, long, introduction message, does not mean that all other messages will necessarily be as long, unless you explicitly tell people this.
I keep encountering this kind of behavior.
And I’m just doing the same thing I’ve been doing for … almost 2 decades?
Like… for the record, it has ‘worked’ to at least some extent, I’ve had multiple year+ relationships that started from doing that…
Just seems like more and more people are having a hostile response to a lengthy intro.
It was like this in the early 00s, you may just have rose coloured glasses.
This is even bleeding over into professional email. I’ve noticed that if I send more than a few paragraphs, the recipient won’t actually read any of it.
I’ve taken to highlighting the important things, so they’ll at least feel like they can reliably skim.
This is nothing new.
Work emails need to be short and to the point. I know, it sucks when you have something complex, but people prefer to talk. So email needs to be more if a record if high points of conversation, or a quick verification of something.
I learned early on that I should only ask one question per text or email. Every boss and project manager I’ve had has been seemingly unable to answer more than one question at a time.
I think I’ll start using your method when explaining things.
I have had multiple VPs ask me complex, technical questions, and then I write them a complex, explanatory answer…
And the reply that I get back includes them literally just saying ‘I didn’t read anything that would have required me to scroll.’
These were boomers.
Fuck, man, ok, at that point, you’re just asking a question to waste my time, apparently?
I’m not gonna dumb down concepts that can’t be dumbed down and still meaningfully answer the question.
I was hired here because I have specialized skills, if you’re too stupid to understand them, maybe realize that good leadership is more about knowing when to defer to your trusted experts, than it is about feeling like you are in total control and understanding of everything, all the time.
It really is no wonder why the entire economy is collapsing, the elites really are just pantomiming a caricature of having a job, doing a job, being an important person.
We’ve 'boys club’d and nepotism’d our way into mass executive incompetence.
When you write three questions, and only the first gets answered in the reply😒
I’ve noticed that if I send more than a few paragraphs, the recipient won’t actually read any of it.
I was reading an article about how some people were using LLMs to generate longer emails with more fluff to make it look like they were putting more work into their emails, and how other people were having LLMs summarize emails that had been sent to them to cut out excessive fluff because it was wasting their time.
One can but imagine what the end game of all this is.
Many people are only semi literate. This cuts two ways- many people struggle with reading longer text, but they also struggle with composing longer text.
I’ve generally worked in tech with rather educated people, but even there the lower portion of their writing skills can be disappointing. Like, a low grade for English Composition 101. Now, remember that most people don’t have even that much training, and don’t practice on their own in ways that encourage (what’s traditionally considered) good writing.
I think this is part of why some people love chatgpt. They’re poor at writing, and now there’s a tool that purports to fix that problem without all the pesky work of practicing and learning.
I’ve generally worked in tech with rather educated people, but even there the lower portion of their writing skills can be disappointing.
I’m pretty sure that education helps. I used to hang out on /r/Europe, which had a lot of non-native English speakers…but who were generally very well educated (probably because of the sort of people who are going to be hanging out on an international forum and writing in some language that often isn’t their native tongue). The quality of the writing was pretty darn good. I’d say that the Dutch users there in particular wrote exceptionally clean English.
That said, it was an interesting experience, because I discovered that there are completely different categories of errors that native and non-native speakers make. For example, I’ve seen plenty of native speakers here in the US confuse “their”, “they’re”, and “there”, probably because they learned to speak the terms long before they wrote them and then kind of mentally linked them in the interim. I virtually never saw that error on /r/Europe, probably because a lot of Europeans learned to write English relatively-early compared to learning to speak it. But I did see a higher proportion of people having problems with some errors that aren’t common among native speakers:
-
Words where English has one word that passed through different languages and then entered English as two different words (e.g. bloc and block).
-
Headlines. Until spending time on that forum, I was basically oblivious to the fact that headlines in English use very different grammar, a different set of conventions, than standard English. I’d grown up reading them, internalized them, never thought about it. Then I wound up on a ton of posts with people in /r/Europe complaining that the submitted headline for an article was completely nonsensical or unreadable. To me, the headlines seemed completely reasonable; at first I thought that users were just joking. Took me a while to realize what was going on. I couldn’t even find any websites that provided a full summary of all of the headline-specific grammatical conventions, just some that had some common examples.
-
Words that have irregular prefixes. For example, someone might write “uncompatible” or “noncompatible” instead of “incompatible”. English has many different prefixes that can mean approximately “not”, (“a-”, “un-”, “anti-”, “non-”, “in-”, “im-”, “ir-”, “ex-”). Just have to memorize them, kind of like grammatical gender in some other languages. I’ve rarely seen native speakers not know the right irregular prefix, but that was an extremely-common error to see on /r/Europe.
-
Specifically for Slavic language users, I saw some users having trouble with definite/indefinite articles (something that doesn’t exist in Slavic languages and is actually fairly uncommon in languages globally) or using gendered pronouns where one wouldn’t in English (modern English has only the tiniest remaining vestiges of grammatical gender).
Also, it was interesting to see where errors did crop up — my impression was that it tended to be with French or maybe Spanish speakers. My guess is that that’s because those languages are the other European languages that are also (relatively) widely-spoken around the world, and so by using English, you expand the pool of people you can talk to the least; I’d guess that people who speak these other languages use English less. For Spanish, it’s maybe a factor of 3. For French, maybe a factor of 5. Compare to something like Icelandic, where it’s something like a factor of 4,000.
-
ChatGPT also dramatically worsens the problem.
It just does the writing and reading for you.
So you then just… never develop any actual reading or writing skills.
Its turning people into something akin to zombies, more or less. Either that or maybe just trying to think of it as some new kind of addiction or mental disability would be a more apt comparison?
I… its baffling, I can barely comprehend how significant and widespread this problem is… when I was in elementary school, I finished assignments and such so fast, with such frequency, that I would get assigned to go out into the hallway and help other kids who were struggling with reading skills, I’d help them read through books, sound out words, explain what they mean.
Thats my point of reference here, I’m back in 2nd grade, helping (probably dyslexic) 4th graders learn how to read.
So you then just… never develop any actual reading or writing skills.
This is one of the scary parts, yes. Reading and writing are fundamental skills that will atrophy if not practiced. Combined with anti-intellectualism, where people fundamentally do not value reading and writing skills, it’s pretty nasty.
I don’t know how to fix it. It’s a gap in values. I often find myself wondering about the people around me, “Why don’t you care?” I don’t know why they don’t care about things.
Why don’t they care?
… The reliance on machines to do their thinking has more or less made them into actual NPCs.
First it was the combined effect of all of the media machines of capitalism, providing so many distractions and distortions.
Now… its much more direct, formidable, capable… total.
Just go look into the number of people who’ve killed themselves or others after more or less being goaded or gaslit into by… their only friend, ChatGPT.
Its realworld cyberpsychosis, from Cyberpunk 2077.
Now you’ve got me wondering when tldr became a thing on the internet
to the best of my memory, at least in my experience, i think it originated on, or perhaps was popularized on early reddit, like, pre 2010, perhaps earlier in other forums?
i guess i would not be surprised if it actually originated on tumblr and then made its way to reddit, but yeah, i think i remember it basically ‘becoming a thing’ roughly around 2008ish? On reddit?
Ah fuck, apparently its first recorded usage was on usenet in 2002.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TL%3BDR
I may have been using the internet since the 90s, but I also was under the age of 10 for most of the 90s, so… yeah I did not exactly know as much about usenet, as say… gamefaqs, and neopets lol.
I blame the early stages of texting when the dawn of cellphones began, when they became more easily accessible.
Then, I blame Twitter and Facebook for character limits. So, it forced people to dumb down everything they try to talk about.
Then, I blame TikTok/Vine/YouTube Shorts for even worsening the attention span of people.
So now it’s like, if you attempt to explain things in great detail, you’ll get one or both reactions. One being, people being snarkily towards you about how the post is at length and it is one thing for your post to be a giant blob of text with no structure. Nobody likes reading that, even I don’t like reading that and I can get wordy.
The other reaction are people who just complain, bitch, moan and cry about how long the post is.
The possibly optimistic way of looking at this is that certified morons will let you know they are such, so, writing something of moderate length effectively serves as a kind of shit-test.
Also, people seem to be mostly unaware that different formatting standards exist and make more sense for different viewing contexts.
I write the vast majority of my lemmy posts on mobile, because I engage with lemmy via mobile.
Every once in a while I get someone screeching at me about horrible formatting… it looks fine on mobile.
Sometimes I get much more polite critiques or suggestions, and then I just usually explain ‘oh I use lemmy on mobile’ and that is generally an amicable conversation…
But a good chunk of people are seemingly baffled and offended by the idea that anyone could be doing anything in a manner different from how they, personally, do it.
It did not used to be like this.
I don’t know about that. I’ve been involved in a lot of long form debate/arguments on forums back in the day and every time you saw a wall of text you had to roll your eyes.
The only difference is we all used to read it all back then. Maybe we just tolerated it better when we were younger.
It’s been this way for a long time. 20 years ago I was told I came off as angry in my texts. It took me a sec, but I figured out it’s bc i put periods at the end of the last sentence.
That sounds like a good plan. See you there
-vs-
That sounds like a good plan. See you there.
That doesn’t sound angry to me, but I suppose things are subjective.
Nah. It’s not subjective. It’s the result of fucking imbeciles that don’t read.
That was meant to be angry because taking correct punctuation as some sort of slight is stupid as shit.
Nah. It’s not subjective. It’s the result of fucking imbeciles that don’t read.
But isn’t that what makes it subjective? Subjective means its meaning is “subject” to the reader’s interpretation. It isn’t objective, which is when the meaning exists outside such frames of reference.
That is, ending a text with a period isn’t a(n objective) rule that always means a particular tone. Instead, it’s a (subjective) understanding made by certain readers (who may be making assumptions that the texter didn’t intend.)
Yes, you’re correct if we want to get technical.
However, I have a difficult time believing that most people truly think that using sentence ending punctuation is default passive aggressive. If I wanted to, I could read “great.” and “great” both as passive aggressive. The default takeaway of a response shouldn’t be negative, it’s just an answer using a rule that indicates that I’ve stopped my reply.
A good reader looks for context clues to decipher meaning. In the end, if one is unsure then just ask for clarification. Starting with a default negative view indicates to me that there is something deeper going on with that person.
Agreed, I don’t see it as passive-aggressive, I see it as using proper punctuation. I’m an oldie, though, and most of the people I text know what I mean when I type. If someone were to react negatively to putting a period in a text, I’d implore them to talk to me about it instead of assuming motive that isn’t there. Then if that doesn’t help, well, guess we won’t be texting each other anymore. I don’t have the time or energy to play silly misinterpretation games with someone who can’t communicate like an adult.
Lmao, this thread is full of self righteous pendants who can’t communicate.
Learn how to write in the way your writing will be read, or don’t bother writing.
If you choose to read literate writing as passive aggressive, well then you can fuck right off.
And that would be my response to anyone behaving this way toward me. It’s wholly a you problem.
Good afternoon.
Lolol how is you living a life where people think that you’re an asshole, a me problem?
Actually no, if you come off like an asshole that is by definition a you problem :)
imbeciles that don’t read
…imbeciles who don’t read
Yes, you are correct. They are people and not things.
You threatening me??
Man, that must suck to be so incredibly insecure that you project your need for constant validation on to, quite literally, the most innocuous thing.
Yeah, I also don’t think it’s only about the full stop. It’s not like they’re using semicolons.
⸮Or even the percontation point. And I don’t see any interrobang‽
omg. i’ve heard of interrobang but never the percontation point. thank you for sharing that!
Some languages like Spanish use it normally. ¿Have you seen a question like this before?
Different punctuation mark, though it’s also a variant on the question mark.
