Contact The Editor
Articles By This Author
I like periods.
I like them in emails. I like them in texts. I like them anywhere a thought comes to a close.
Once upon a time, those emphatic dots were the workhorses of the punctuation world. Nothing mysterious or fancy about them. Even if you weren't sure where to put your commas or your colons, you could figure out the periods.
I am, therefore, very sad to learn that in the realm of text messages, it's time to say R.I.P. to periods as we've known them.
I'm a little late to the period's funeral, a loss I didn't register until Thursday when someone forwarded me an old article from
Under the headline, "The Period is Pissed," the writer,
"In most written language," he contends, "the period is a neutral way to mark a pause or complete a thought; but digital communications are turning it into something more aggressive."
Among many texters, it seems, using a period no longer benignly signifies the end of a thought; it signals that there's no room for argument or further discussion.
The polite way to signal the end of a sentence, it seems, is with a line break. For example, if I wanted to have coffee with you, the friendly text would be:
Let's have coffee
Meet me at starbucks
Less friendly, more demanding would be:
Let's have coffee. Meet me at
Looking at these sentences -- can a phrase without a period be called a sentence? -- I can sense the tonal difference.
And yet for those of us trained to punctuate back before "text" was a verb, renouncing periods feels like an act of heresy.
After I read the
"We all have a texting personality," he said. "Probably formed by the age of 10."
His remark got me to wondering: What are the texting personalities? And is it possible to change?
Here's my breakdown.
1. The Stickler
You learned to punctuate in grade school. You were good at it, and you will never abandon the source of your glory, no matter how technology or the language changes.
You may have been an English major in college. If so, you take pride in the fact that, though you can barely hammer a nail straight, you can punctuate better than any engineer.
If you inadvertently omit a period in a text -- which you do because your eyes aren't what they used to be and those keys are criminally small -- you will spend two minutes trying to correct the error.
How much of a stickler are you? Your texts even contain semicolons.
You are over 40.
2. The Slacker
Periods, meh, whatever.
who needs caps
who needs question marks
iF your finGers slip and you Type CAPS where they're not needed who cares
You believe that texts are closer to conversation than to writing, ergo the regular writing rules do not apply.
You never use the word "ergo," except, perhaps, ironically.
You have never used a semicolon in anything, much less a text. You may not be sure what one is, unless you read The New Yorker. If you are sure, you're equally sure that semicolons should be put in the language garbage bin along with "thou" and "whilst."
But you do like exclamation marks!!!
You are under 40. Or you have teenage children.
3. The Young Counterculturist or Old Fogey
You do not text. You are proud of it. You think all this texting is ruining real communication.
4. The Evolutionist
You are a lapsed stickler. You prefer the term "flexible."
You used to argue that sloppy texting was beyond lazy; it was a linguistic slippery slope. Bad texting habits, you were sure, would contaminate all your writing.
You no longer have time or energy for that fight, and though pride still forces you to try to punctuate correctly when you text, you spend less time correcting your errors unless it involves business.
You realize that life is too short to spend it perfecting your text messages, especially to people who don't notice the difference.
You're not getting any younger, though you hope that texting without periods will make you feel you are.
Comment by clicking here.
Mary Schmich is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
