Ending Text Messages With Dots Can Make Them Insincere.
Closing a text message with a dot can make it grammatically correct, but recent research shows that it can also make it cold and insincere.
Research by Celia Wedge of Binghamton University and published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior suggests that text messages end with a period, making them less authentic to the recipient. Participants in the study read short conversations with responses that either contained or did not contain messages ending with a period. When messages were in the form of text messages, as opposed to handwritten notes, messages ending with a period were generally judged to be less genuine than messages that did not end with a period. Wedge explains why in a statement for EurekaAlert! :
Text messages are missing many of the social cues used in real face-to-face conversations. During a conversation, people easily convey social and emotional information with gaze, facial expressions, tone of voice, pauses, etc. Obviously, people cannot use these mechanisms when they write text messages. Thus, text message operators rely on what is available to them – smilies, deliberate misspellings that mimic the sounds of speech, and, to our knowledge, punctuation.
It’s no surprise that communication is evolving as text messaging is slowly becoming the dominant method of communication, and these social cues are easy to spot in everyday correspondence. For example, the messages “Yes, everything is fine” or “Yes, everything is fine!” seems much less intense than “Yes, it’s okay.” The point in the second example makes the message less relaxed and more definitive. Whichever platform you choose to send text messages , you can think about how your messages will be received. You can find the full study at the link below.
Text Messaging Is Disingenuous: The Role of Period in Text Messaging | Computers in Human Behavior via The Washington Post