A recent article in the New York Times noted a distressing trend in social media: Many people are omitting periods (called “full stops” in the UK) from their text messages. According to David Crystal, author of more than 100 books on language, “We are at a momentous moment.” Instant messaging doesn’t require end punctuation, he says: It’s perfectly obvious where the sentence ends, even if there’s no period. “So why use it?” he asks.
Well, I can give you one pretty convincing argument for using it: If you don’t use punctuation conventions, no reputable publisher will touch your manuscript.
So I’m not fretting over the alleged disappearance of the period (or full stop). But I’m intrigued by something that Crystal mentioned in his interview with the Times: In instant messaging, periods are sometimes used to show irony or annoyance.
For example, picture this scenario: A husband tells his wife that he’s skipping tonight’s school conference because he has too much to do at the office. She immediately suspects the real reason: He wants to avoid a standoff with their daughter’s teacher, who’s been complaining about Janey’s behavior in class. Here’s a snippet of their back-and-forth texts:
She: you just dont want 2 be there
He: hell no i hate these conferences
She: fine.
Can you hear the cold, flat, ok-you-win anger in her response? That period nails it (and nails him for trying to shirk his duties as a father).
____________________________________________________________
Several things are going on here that I think are worth noting. Because Twitter imposes a 140-character limit, it makes sense to omit anything unnecessary – including end punctuation. That doesn’t mean everyone will follow suit. Newspapers have long used space-saving lower-case letters for titles like Queen, Pope, and President. That hasn’t stopped the rest of us from capitalizing those words. So I don’t see a slippery-slope happening here.
But I do see something else: People who send instant messages are learning how to make their texts replicate the human voice. That is an astounding development.
When I’m working with a student writer, I often hear protests when I delete an unnecessary comma: “That’s supposed to indicate a dramatic pause.” “The comma is showing hesitation and uncertainty.”
Nope. It just shows that you don’t know how to use commas.
Writers have only one tool to insert a space into a sentence…the ellipsis. If you’re a strict grammarian, you use an ellipsis only for omitted words (a shortened quotation in a research paper, for example). Despite my general conservatism and crankiness about punctuation, I think it’s ok to use an ellipsis for a dramatic pause – in fact I rather like it.
But – truth to tell – that practice isn’t very useful, for two reasons. One is that an ellipsis looks formal and out of place in a folksy conversation. Another is that those three dots quickly become wearisome. If you’re writing a conversation with many pauses for hesitations and dramatic effect, your finished product is going to look odd.
What to do? Most writers end up either a) taking up drinking or b) doing lots of rewrites until they get the effect they want.
Those are the best answers I can give you…but perhaps all those people who are tapping away on their devices are going to come up with some fresh possibilities for the rest of us.
Is the period disappearing?
