[ajmurmann]

Your mention of messages ending in a period and this topic in general really makes me recommend Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch. It's a book by a linguist about the evolution of language on the internet.

It does a great job at not only showing how this evolution happened, especially around communicating emotions and things like sarcasm, but also at describing the different cohorts who started using the internet at different times and under different circumstances.

It actually has changed how I write on slack. I'm now for example more deliberate about omitting or including periods, break up what before would have been a long, email-like message into smaller messages.

It also made me aware that ellipses have different meaning for different age groups