We all know a grammar nazi. The kind of guy who will stop you mid-conversation to tell you that you used the wrong ‘your’ in the thought you just had and that puts you below him on an evolutionary level. Bad news for him, people apparently find correctly punctuated texts insincere. So he’ll come off as much of a dick in text messages as he does in real life.
So the next time somebody asks you if you wanna chill, opt for the sincere ‘K’ rather than the blatantly full of s**t ‘K.’
The study was conducted by Celia Klin and her team of researchers at the Binghamton University. It found that text messages that end with a period are perceived to be less sincere by those who read them.
To conduct their research, Klin and her team had 126 Binghamton undergraduates read a series of 16 messaging exchanges that involved answers both with and without punctuation. Klin says that in conversation humans easily convey meaning with body language, tone, expression, and a whole number of cues. While texting, we swap those obvious social cues for things like punctuation, strategic misspellings, and emojis.
While sentences ended with periods are considered insincere, exclamation points tick all those keepin’ it real boxes. According to Klin,
“Punctuation is used and understood by texters to convey emotions and other social and pragmatic information. 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.”
Neat.