7
votes
The death of punctuation
I've noticed a trend where people, young and old, are just not punctuating their sentences anymore. Is it intentional? Do people not know how to punctuate their sentences? Surely, this is not good.
okay but punctuating how because i know some people who have got so done with autocorrect that they just turned it off and cant be bothered to manually punctuate anymore and ive seen some people here on tildes and other websites and even blog authors who dont bother with much puctuating either like they wont use apostrophes commas or uppercase letters but theyll at least user periods to stop their sentences still which i think is a bit like her telling you to take the condom off but then you pull out before finishing inside her but what do i know
Am I too gay to get the metaphor
Maybe not gay enough. Gotta try harder!
I suppose commas or capitalization aren't a big deal in casual texting situations. But periods are a must if the goal is not to have a stroke.
maybe that's why I got into the habit of sending many short messages making up a broader "transaction" from my end because I think periods = multiple sentences in a message, and that comes across as too serious
so for the most part my messages in texting situations are written like this, where I don't want to add a period and the period is effectively the end of a particular text
sorry to my friends who will never read this but if you are the type to have phone notifications on for discord DMs, please let me know if this is bothering you because I really can try to do this less depending on who im messaging
I'm kind of the opposite. I will write massive walls of text and send one singular message no matter the number of topics contained in it. Even if you send me N messages spanning N distinct topics, you will get a single message containing ≥N paragraphs of text.
I'm too self-conscious about sending multiple notifications to people, I'm too worried about people getting an incorrect/incomplete meaning from my messages before I'm done, I don't want to keep N parallel pseudo-threads for every distinct topic, and I just am naturally verbose so I always end up producing gigantic word vomits anyway.
I'm happy to tailor this if someone has a legit reason, but that's what mostly comes naturally
Edit: That said, it's pretty common for me to not add a period to the last sentence of a message/post, or even the last sentence of a paragraph, depending on the mood
I've gotten into the habit of numbering the different parts of my multipurpose messages.
And quite a few people have gotten the hang of answering with numbers too (to the parts that they want and just ignoring the rest, as you do!)
Works wonders in my experience!
I'm the same as you and my coworkers all hate me for it. I wish more people communicated this way because to me it's a lot easier and more logical.
This feels like counting drops in the ocean from the ISS.
On sites like this? On reddit? On email? I absolutely will use punctuation and capitalization. I'll even re-read my comments/posts hours later and edit them if I see mistakes. For email, it sometime takes me an hour to draft a message, because I'm trying to make sure everything sounds and looks good.
But on text messages, Signal/WhatsApp, Discord, even Teams messages at work between me and a coworker or a few coworkers I'm cool with? Nah. No point. Really, it's signaling closeness and level of comfort. Like, "Hey, you and I are cool; we're friends or at least friendly, right? Let's not be so formal with each other; there's no need."
Idk. Some languages have that T-V distinction. Where people you're familiar with are addressed with the T word, while others you don't know as well are addressed by the more formal V word. I think French even has terms for that: "Vouvoyer" and "Tutoyer." To me, lack of capitalization and punctuation in certain contexts and mediums is basically the same thing as "Tutoyer."
And there's definitely meaning behind punctuation on texts. Like a period at the very end of a text can mean terseness or seriousness. Now if my Boomer Dad does it -- and he does -- I don't think anything of it. Because he doesn't know about that stuff, nor does he care. But with someone my age (Millennial) or younger? And/or who I know normally doesn't leave periods at the end of a message? Hmm...Are they mad at me? And I do the same. It's a signal. Of course, I only use that signal with people who know it. And I can tell from their texts whether they do or not.
I used to do that as well. But in a work related context, that is just not time worth spending. I got cured of that over time when I started mailing with managers and receiving mails from people high up the totem pole. Where I noticed that the higher up people are in an organization, the less punctuated their mails are to the point of being sloppy. Combined with the fact that many people just poorly read mail no matter how much time I spend on writing them, I just stopped worrying about it so much.
Mind you, I'll still do a read over and make sure it is presentable. But I am just not that bothered by "the tone" being perfect. Frankly, I think I spend more time on Tildes comments than I do on work related mails now that I think about it.
I did read once about how people lower on the totem pole, when talking to people higher up, will be more verbose and follow proper punctuation and all that, while those higher up, responding, tend not to be.
I think the particular context was students and professors in college, where a student making a request of their professor via email would write like two paragraphs, all proper, only for the prof to answer back merely "yes" or "no" with no punctuation/capitalization or anything. It had something to do with time management. That professors had a lot of emails to get through, and didn't have time to "properly" respond to everyone. Plus being "higher up," the student isn't going to chide the professor. So it's an example of power dynamics.
I don't send emails very often, thankfully, so that's why it doesn't bother me that much. But I do do the thing where if there's a back and forth over multiple emails, I get increasingly informal. No more salutations, no more closings, no more signatures. My responses may become single liners. Because at that point, it's becoming chat messages, but just over email.
I like using proper punctuation, but there are some peculiarities depending on the medium. When I’m texting, I leave the final sentence unpunctuated unless it’s with an exclamation point or question mark. Ending with a period feels too heavy unless you’re trying to convey a serious tone.
I increasingly just ignore messages like that. If they can't be bothered, I can't either.
I think so, I intentionally omit hard stops when I’m texting or otherwise writing casual text, it’s ultimately more indicative of the flow of conversational speech, where people rarely take such long and intentional pauses unless it is a written speech that is being performed
There are alternative ways of indicating the end of a piece of a text as well, like a new line
If you want to see this taken to the extreme in a high-art fashion, read a cormack mccarthy book
I don’t think it really matters, anyhow, and it’s not a sign of moral or intellectual decay
I don't mind omitting some punctuation in casual text. What I'm referring to is unironically writing like @hungariantoast's comment, which has become more common for whatever reason.
In what contexts are people doing this in formal contexts? Do you have examples of like journalistic articles or other serious documents written like that?
Not in formal contexts, just online
I tend to punctuate where it matters, but not bother otherwise. So to me that means punctuate for Facebook posts, tildes, work messages, etc. Then not bother with text messages, notes for myself, etc. I do tend to view people who don't punctuate in professional environments as somewhat unprofessional and lazy, but at the end of the day I don't care that much.
Languages evolve and adapt over time and I'm sure the way we wrote 20 years ago would piss off someone from 50 years, as the way they wrote would someone 100 years ago. Lifes too short to care
I learned to type in the 8th grade on a typewriter and I had to learn punctuation, spacing, home row, all of that. So now I type quickly on keyboards and I automatically default to proper formatting. I express about a third of all of my sentiments in the form of GIFs in Discord in my personal life, and Teams at work, and everywhere else I am operating at a significant handicap. But...
i actually have to force myself to think about it to not use proper formatting
They told me that my lols and rofls would render English spoken online unintelligible, and maybe it did, but I don't see short form taking over anywhere but personal speech, and that's where it's always dominated. In my professional life people will use short form inter-personally, but when we have to address corporate, we swap to proper formatting. All articles I read are in proper formatting, as well. I see no problem with this; I don't think I could take seriously a run-on sentence trying to report the news of the day. But if you come at me with proper punctuation and formatting in private life, I might wonder why you're being so formal.
What I'm saying is... ngl i guess it pays to be multi-modal
just speaking for myself
Like many my age (31), my formative years included much, much time spent online interacting with strangers. Perhaps because it was simply part of the culture at the time, because I would type at age 10 on the Neopets forums as I do now on Tildes (though hopefully I'm much more coherent and less naive than I was at 10). I know some users here have brought up the... culture here as reminiscent of old internet boards and forums. I know that part of the draw of Reddit for me over, say, Tumblr or Instagram, was the same. Not that I need a 500 word statement on every little thing, and admittedly I don't think I've ever had an attention span that could handle some of the more... engaged? debates you might see here. But something like, say, witty Tumblr responses with all lower case, zero punctuation, sarcasm and irony cranked up to max - those just don't feel right to me. That's what I associate "not punctuating their sentences anymore".
And of course, I said "culture" but that's not all encompassing of the internet. Over time it just became simpler to speak without punctuation, particularly in video games. Heck, when I was maybe in my early 20s I'd talk to my friends about how I would deliberately disable auto-capitalization on smartphones because I wanted to be able to control that. There were times where full punctuation, dotted i's, crossed t's, were their own form of conveying seriousness and tone. And there were times when I genuinely wanted my messages to be read less seriously. When I think of how I might joke with some friends in person or verbally in a voice call, if I had to transcribe that dialogue without any additional side text on how the text would be read... sometimes it would just be all lowercase, no punctuation / minimal punctuation.
This might be completely different from what you were thinking when opening this thread because I admittedly don't have any thumb on the pulse of modern human interaction. As I write this I realize - hmm, is it possible you're even thinking of the way people may speak verbally without coherent, natural "stops"? Where do you observe these trends? I don't know! But I'd have this conversation with some friends when we'd reminisce on how much we've all changed regarding how we communicate with others online.
If you're talking about text messages I don't really care. A blank line works as a "." and most messages are short enough that you can understand it perfectly with little to no punctuation.
Text messaging is an informal context. I care about their correction about as much as I care about correction on in-person informal conversations. Which is very little.
I haven't noticed a shift on long-form, formal or semi formal contexts.
Every once in a while someone writes long-form without capitalization. Every once in a while I express my contempt for that. But that's another subject. Thankfully, lowercase long-form is still rare.
If we're talking exclusively about text messages, people have been talking about the death of proper language at least since the early 1990s because of IRC, which I used. And here I am trying to write properly on a language that is not even my own. I'm not very worried.
I mix it up depending on the message, the medium, and the context. If I'm sending a standalone sentence to a friend, I probably won't capitalize it nor use any punctuation. If I'm trying to explain a more complex or nuanced idea that requires multiple sentences or paragraphs then I'm more likely to use proper punctuation, although I don't fret about the details.