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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

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.)

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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.

The non-use of grammar is an adaptation to indicate a different "tone" of communication. As an example, it can be used to indicate sarcasm.

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 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.

Eg.

> I'll be home late tonight

>> Okay

VS:

> I'll be home late tonight

>> Okay.

    > I'll be home late tonight
    
    >> Okay.

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

I feel like periods mark the end of a sentence. So I use them all the time, even in text messages.

I've had people get actually angry with me for doing it.

ok.

Text/instant messages have evolved their own norms, as all language does. To many people, periods have a different meaning there. See e.g. https://www.npr.org/2020/09/05/909969004/before-texting-your...

So again, people below 20 dictate what everyone else must do. It's a race to the bottom.

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.

It's just a different convention. I don't see how that makes it a 'race to the bottom'.

Angry? "Eff Off" buddy.

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.

It really feels abrupt, to be honest.

Mostly because most chat messages are single sentences.

So I guess that people leave them out when they aren't part of a full paragraph of text.

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.

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?

Confused.

For me, only when used on a single short message sentence. Long explanations and paragraphs get punctuated at usual.

I'll also add I'm not the arbiter of what is and isn't correct or wrong, just explaining my own opinion.

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."

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.

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