[soggybutter]

100% agree about ending periods. I always read those messages as being irritated or overly firm. Potentially worse, though, are people who have a habit of abusing ellipses (...) in weird places. My boss does this in virtually every sentence, sometimes multiple times, and it always comes off like he can't believe you'd say something so stupid

[iamdbtoo]

I find this odd because, to me, attributing malice because of the presence of a period is something you do in your own mind. You don't know the emotional state of the person who sent it, so you think of the worst possible outcome, but both are equally likely in the moment. You're just as free to give them the benefit of the doubt.

[tobr]

You can apply the same reasoning to any of the myriad ways we pick up social, emotional clues from people around us. Facial expressions, body language, brevity, melody, choice of words, clothing, typography, use of emojis, and so on. All of these things are nuanced, vibrant, easily misjudged hints of what another person is feeling, how they see you, or how much they care. You can’t really choose freely how to interpret them, you just do, and sometimes you’re bound to get it wrong.

[powersnail]

> You can't really choose freely how to interpret them

Of course, you can.

That first moment of gut feeling is outside the control of your consciousness, but after that, it's a choice.

You can tell yourself, and persuade yourself, that you don't know the why the other person ended a sentence with a period. Because, the fact is, you don't.

Not to mention that an ending period is quite commonly added by dictation software, so it's not even certain that the other person added it by choice.

Furthermore, the myriad of social cues usually emerge in a whole package. You get to see a whole face, or a whole body, with the words, said with human voice. That's significantly more data than the presence of a period.

[iamdbtoo]

How you intepret those is absolutely a choice. If you do not have enough information to know 100% what the intention of the other person is, then wherever you land is a decision. If it's that the person is angry, that's your choice the same if you believe the person is not angry.

[phist_mcgee]

You sound like you have never worked in the business world before. Half of business is picking up on tone, ambiguous phrasing, and empty promises with smiles. Reading between the lines is a core part of interpreting meaning, and it why many people with autism spectrum disorders really struggle with things like sales, or people management (at least from the customer or employee's side). Nuance is everything here.

If my boss chucks an ellipsis at the end of the message, does that mean he wants me to....

Answer an implied question?

Wait for him to keep writing more information?

That he wants me to justify what he has just said?

It is not a choice as you argue, to interpret meaning behind ambiguous communication, and have effective communication. I cannot ignore implied tone, because I 'don't have 100% certainty of their intention'

[iamdbtoo]

You're talking about a completely different situation. In that situation, you should probably ask your boss for more information instead of assuming what he wants based on puncuation. I'm just saying that given the choice between applying malice to the punctuation, maybe do the opposite.

[MauranKilom]

That is entirely true, and I personally try to be very open-minded about how a particular message could have been meant. But you do have to make some decision regarding the interpretation (preferably the most favorable one) in order to compose an adequate reply.

And that's where things get difficult - at least in non-interactive environments. I've become very wary of the thousands of slight misinterpretations that my email messages might allow, and tend to rewrite most sentences once or twice to make the wording as unmistakable as possible (usually in a cycle of "how could this sentence be interpreted uncharitably?" -> fix it up).

With increasing daily email volumes I've had to tone that practice down (at least for less delicate messages) to get anything done at all. But you never really know how something was perceived unless it went really wrong.

[adjkant]

> If you do not have enough information to know 100% what the intention of the other person is

That's the thing - you almost never do.

> How you interpret those is absolutely a choice

The crux of the problem here is putting that choice on the reader instead of leaving them without one. Communicating emotion in text solves this issue of interpretation.

[musingsole]

It's something people do in their own minds because experience generally proves out most people only use a period in a single statement message if they're emphasizing firmness. Those who do use the period and don't mean firmness are a minority and are generally demonstrating they aren't accustomed to chatting in text (or potentially have always been talking from a position of authority, so no one's mentioned how they're coming off).

[Bedon292]

I have been chatting via text, as a major form of communication, for more than 20 years and at least 2/3s of my life. Before this thread, I have never even contemplated a period having any meaning more than the end of a though. And I certainly had no position of authority, so that didn't affect anything.

I am really curious how this evolved, and how I missed it being something people think. My biases tend to lean towards viewing people who don't use punctuation and capitalization as being less professional. I couldn't care less in something like a random chat in discord. But for Slack, as a work tool, I prefer to stay "professional".

I wonder what other seemingly unspoken biases are out there? Especially in a time where we are spending much more time in text instead of in person.

[musingsole]

It's not a new or unknown convention/perception (as shown by the article posted here discussing the pissed period in 2013). I can't tell you why you would've been unaware of it, and I certainly wouldn't want to offend by guessing! :P

A lot of it has to be context. If I'm talking to someone new, I'm going to try very hard to read very little into the text they've sent me. If it's a message from my partner -- yeah, every aspect of that message can communicate something to me. And in that latter case, a period on a short statement is a warning sign equivalent to passive-aggressive "I'm fine."

Another thought is it literally changes how I read a sentence. Considering "I'm fine." vs "I'm fine" vs "I'm fine...", the first ends abruptly and is cut off. The second ends more gently and naturally. And the last trails off implying...something depending on the person and context. Consider poetry. No punctuation, a comma, a dash, a semi-colon, or a period each imply a type of pause (or lack of pause) at that moment in the words. And in poetry, that can mean everything.

[Bedon292]

I am really curious just how common this is. I know that article existed in 2013, but how many people read it and agreed with it? If you produced a large survey across a broad age range and diverse set of background, how common is this? The fact that I have never come across this before today makes me feel biased towards it being rare. But the very existence of this thread seems to indicate it is relatively common.

I know another person in this thread mentioned a study about short (one word) responses being interpreted differently based on punctuation, or lack thereof. But that doesn't appear to have studied full sentences with or without.

With your example, I am basically blind to the existence of the period. So "I'm fine." vs "I'm fine" are identical in my interpretation. Or at least they were before today. The ellipsis does register as a trailing thought, and I definitely read meaning into that.

To me, a sentence should normally end in a period. However, due to the informality of chat, it is acceptable to leave off in the final sentence of a message. It being there vs not being there has never conveyed a meaning to me. I really would like to know how many things people were meaning, which I missed because of this. Or if people are interpreting my inclusion of standard punctation, with no meaning, as something more.

[BeetleB]

> It's not a new or unknown convention/perception (as shown by the article posted here discussing the pissed period in 2013)

2013 is new.

When you say:

> because experience generally proves out most people only use a period in a single statement message if they're emphasizing firmness

I suspect your experience is with one crowd, and older people's experience is not as much with that crowd. Furthermore, older people simply have a lot more experience by virtue of being older, so that statement is simply not true for them.

Texting and IM is more common amongst the younger crowd, so conventions are going to be more weighted towards their preferences. But the notion of a period being used for emphasis is limited to that crowd. For the majority of the population (and perhaps including those who are non-native English speakers), putting a period at the end is fairly normal, and considered correct.

Language is dynamic, so I don't doubt that in 20 years I'll be "wrong".

[musingsole]

> I suspect your experience is with one crowd

That's a large assumption without knowing a thing about me. Though I exist in a bubble as everyone else. Age with internet chatting is interesting because no matter how old you are, there is actually a finite amount of experience anyone alive today could have with it. There's a large age block that irrespective of the individual age probably have about the same level of experience with chat (i.e. starting on usenet/IRC and staying with it all until now). Oh, I know some fortran. Still wanna guess my age?

I'm going to re-emphasize a point I made earlier that invalidates any age-based arguments: Poetry. The conventions of interpreting far more meaning from punctuation than a reader tends to from long form prose have been around far longer than anyone alive today.

[djur]

It's specifically something that came out of SMS, where people have traditionally conserved characters (and typing punctuation could be annoying on earlier phones). Intentionally using unnecessary punctuation in a context where it's not conventional seems like a shift to formality, or coldness. It's like a parent using their child's full name when they usually go by a nickname (or, god forbid, their full first AND middle name).

[mindcrime]

I have been chatting via text, as a major form of communication, for more than 20 years and at least 2/3s of my life. Before this thread, I have never even contemplated a period having any meaning more than the end of a though. And I certainly had no position of authority, so that didn't affect anything.

Same here.

[iamdbtoo]

I don't agree that putting a period in casual textual communication is inherently hostile. I also don't agree that those who do are just simply unaware of the chaos they are causing.

At the end, though, you're still making a judgement about someone with very little information and you have a choice not to do that.

[solidasparagus]

> I don't agree that putting a period in casual textual communication is inherently hostile

In communication, your opinion of how something will be interpreted is far less important than opinions of the people doing the interpretation. You can stand firm in believing that adding the period doesn't make your message more hostile, but that won't change how your readers feel.

[soggybutter]

You're right and I do try not to do that. But as someone who's used text based communication every day for more than half my life, there's definitely some unconscious bias I've developed towards specific behaviors that I don't think is random. I've talked to plenty of folks who feel the same, and there are a lot of memes out there that support it. At the end of the day, it's up to you as the communicator to try and convey what you really mean, and text is notoriously easy to misunderstand.

[iamdbtoo]

I know it's a thing and I have felt it myself in the past.

What I really have trouble with is that we all admit it's most likely a faulty interpretation, but we still expect the other person to manage it for us. If everyone gave each other the benefit of the doubt more, none of this would be necessary.

[saurik]

https://newrepublic.com/article/115726/period-our-simplest-p...

[bccdee]

ATTRIBUTING ANGER TO ME JUST BECAUSE I'M WRITING IN ALL CAPS IS SOMETHING YOU'RE DOING IN YOUR HEAD, BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN I SHOULDN'T TAKE INTO ACCOUNT THE FACT THAT MY WRITING THIS WAY WILL PROVOKE THAT REACTION FROM OTHERS.

[Aeolun]

Maybe, but if I put a period at the end of a single short message you better believe it’s malicious or I want you to shut up.

[gundmc]

I've noticed a quirk when communicating over IM with many of my Indian colleagues. They use two dots (..) really often and I'm not sure how to interpret it. If I view it as equivalent to a three for ellipsis, it often comes across as rude or passive aggressive which I can't believe to be the intention.

Is anyone else familiar with this and can shed some light?

[oceliker]

I'm not Indian, but I used to do this a lot when I was younger. My thought process was that a single dot would come across as serious or passive-aggressive (there's a discussion about this phenomenon somewhere in this thread) and ellipses would similarly be rude. Two dots somehow seemed like a nice way to come across as more friendly, and/or indicate a tiny pause between sentences.

I used to do this in the times when we were separately charged for every text with our cellular service. I'd try to fit as many sentences as possible to each sent message. With the rise of internet based texting, it became unnecessary to use sentence separators, because I could just separate them by sending multiple messages (and not use any punctuation at the end of each sentence, which is the current accepted "friendly" way of communication).

[sk0g]

Not sure if it helps, but in Hindi, the punctuation, roughly, translates like this:

  |  => ,
  || => .

Could this be the reason?

[vangelis]

What could he mean by that...? You're doing a great job...

[necovek]

I am not sure why would you think that... If a period is to make a statement firmer, ellipsis does it triple...

Like that, right? ;)

[lapetitejort]

...I have a coworker who starts nearly every sentence thus so, as if continuing from the last sentence, even if you haven't talked to him in a few days.

[djur]

Someone I converse with regularly online has a tendency to do this in a way that strongly conveys "your idiocy has left me speechless" in contexts where he seems to (or at least claims to) only intend "your position is surprising".

[WhyCause]

I use the ellipsis at the start of an IM sentence primarily when I've accidentally hit enter mid-thought.

[bccdee]

I actually just posted about the ellipses elsewhere in this thread ... Much in the same way that carriage returns are used to signify new sentences instead of periods in certain internet environments, ellipses used to be common sentence-separators in other mediums during the mid-20th century ... Specifically, if you dig up old postcards from that time, you'll find them littered with ellipses

[molszanski]

I often interpret ellipses at the end of a sentence as an inability to express oneself in a written form.

[Aeolun]

My BA’s often respond to messages with: ok..

And I’m left wondering if they just typed an extra period or whether they’re trailing off...

[soggybutter]

I feel I need to come back and report that my manager just sent this in slack: "I Agree!!..."