When You Send Text Messages Using This, People Don’t Trust You

If you include commas and periods, people think you’re lying. What?! (Getty Images)

Want your date to believe that you truly do want to meet him or her for dinner and are just innocently running late? Want your sister to trust that you honestly have no idea where her favorite sweater could be? It may be better to just leave the punctuation off of your text message, then.

Texting is now the predominant way Americans under the age of 50 communicate. And according to a new study published in Computers in Human Behavior and discussed in Pacific Standard, how you punctuate your text messages not only affects how the recipient judges your grammatical skills, but also how they interpret the very sincerity of your message. Specifically, it seems, when it comes to that most basic of punctuation: the period.

In a small study, researchers from Binghamton University had 126 undergraduates read a series of text messages and handwritten notes and then rate the sincerity of the receivers response on a scale of 1 to 7, they found that text messages ending with a period were consistently perceived to be less sincere than ones that do not. To determine this, the researchers, led by associate professor of psychology Celia M. Klin, Ph.D., presented participants with 16 different simple conversational exchanges to rank. Each exchange included an invitation phrased as a question, such as “Want to go to the movies?” followed by a simple one-word reply like “Yeah” or “Sure.” And interestingly enough, when a final period was left off of a handwritten note, study participants ranked it no differently than its properly punctuated counterparts. But when a final period was left off of a text message, study participants rated the message as more sincere — meaning, of course, that the inverse, a text message that included a final period, was thus perceived as less sincere. (Please, nobody tell our high school English teachers. It might break their grammatically-correct hearts.)

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So why do we interpret text and handwritten communication differently? “Our claim is not so much that the period is used to convey a lack of sincerity in text messages,” the researchers carefully explain in the study’s documentation, “but that punctuation is one of the cues used by senders, and understood by receivers, to convey pragmatic and social information.” All of which makes logical sense when you consider the fact that text messages are by nature short and sweet, and therefor must use every character — be it classic verbiage and punctuation or modern emojis — to convey context. Thus when we fire off a text message sans punctuation, said message is likely to seem more spontaneous, and thus more truthful, to the recipient.

“Although texting is a form of written language, it is used and understood more like spoken language in many situations,” Dr. Klin tells Yahoo Health. “The quick back and forth in texting mimics a conversation. It’s chatty. In real conversations people easily convey social and emotional information with eye gaze, facial expressions, tone of voice, pauses, and so on. People obviously can’t use these mechanisms when they are texting so they seem to rely on what they have – things such as punctuation, emoticons and deliberate misspellings that mimic speech sounds,” like typing out an elongated ‘sooooo’ or ‘hiiiiiii.’

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As one of the first punctuation marks created, the period was once completely neutral in nature and served only to note a definitive pause. But over time, as the ways in which we communicate evolve, that simplicity has given way to more nuanced interpretations. In 2013, the period was cited for making a text message appear aggressive. Now, perhaps because of what Dr. Klin refers to as its “more stuffy and formal” nature, the period can catch people by surprise when received in the middle of a chatty, informal text conversation. And that surprise leads to skepticism. All of which, she says, also anecdotally explains why people use so many exclamation marks in texts: “People maybe have a sense that there’s always a risk with written language to convey annoyance or sarcasm, so they use exclamation marks to ensure that they are not misunderstood.”

Dr. Klin and colleagues are, in fact, now undertaking a similar study to determine how exclamation marks impact the interpretation of text messages, and while it’s far too early to make any conclusive statements, the professor posits that exclamation marks, with their inherent enthusiasm, will ultimately only serve to convey more sincerity.

“Language change is often slow or hard to observe,” she adds. “But with the explosion of various types of computer mediated communication, such as texting, it’s a perfect opportunity to watch people’s use of language change.”

Who knows: As technology continues to advance, the pendulum may swing back, and we may all start peppering our text messages with semi colons, or “laughing out loud” instead of “LOL.” (Or maybe autocorrect with just do it for us.) In the meantime, “the only thing I can say, when emailing and texting, is to be careful — especially if you’re angry or annoyed,” advises Dr. Klin. “We as people are really tuned into the subtleties of language, so we really need to be careful with our words — and our punctuation, too.”

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