It's really hard to tell how the person is feeling through text messaging. However a new study seems to find a surprising discovery: Adding a period at the end of your text makes it appear less sincere.
NBC News reports that the lack of nonverbal cues like the tone and facial expressions make it hard to tell how a person you are texting is feeling. With the recent research led by Celia Klin at Binghamton University, however, we get to learn one rule: While ending text messages with a period may be grammatically correct, it makes our text messages less sincere.
The study had 126 undergrad participants who examined a number of one-word text message responses like "Sure and "Yep'. These responses ended with different types of punctuations. It turns out that text messages ending in periods were rated as being less sincere. Ironically, handwritten notes with the same message and ended with the same punctuation aren't deemed as such.
The reason is the way people have developed how to express and interpret things in digital communication. Take the exclamation mark for example. It actually produced the opposite effect on the message; it makes the responses sound more sincere to the participants.
"Given that people are wonderfully adept at communicating complex and nuanced information in conversations, it's not surprising that as texting evolves, people are finding ways to convey the same types of information in their texts," said Kim in a press release announcing the research.
The study entitled "Texting Insincerely: The Role of Period in Text Messaging" was published in November in the journal of Computers in Human Behaviour.
"It makes sense that texters rely on what they have available to them - emoticons, deliberate misspellings that mimic speech sounds and, according to our data, punctuation," she continued.
So if you're texting right now and is about to end your message with a period, you may want to reconsider.
