The Period at the End of a Text Message
A note on how technology shapes grammar.
People have been using periods to end sentences since Ancient Greece. Originally, people used a high dot (˙) to mark the end of a thought, but in Medieval Europe, they switched to the low mark (.) because it was easier to standardized with typesetting. This low mark has been our “full stop” ever since.
Until text messages.
According to linguist John McWhorter, texting enables you to write like you speak. Sure, this is something we could’ve done with handwritten letters or email, but even if you can type on a computer keyboard as fast as you can speak, it doesn’t mean the person necessarily receives the message that quickly. There’s an inherent delay in these older forms of communication that, in turn, set them up to use more traditional written language structures.
Until, of course, the text message.
“Once you have things in your pocket that can [send and receive messages quickly], then you have the conditions that allow us to write like we speak,” McWhorter explained in a TED Talk. “And that’s where texting comes in. And so, texting is very loose in its structure. No one thinks about capital letters or punctuation when one texts, but then again, do you think about those things when you talk? No, and so therefore why would you when you were texting?”
Texting, functionally, is “fingered speech.” It enables us to write the way we talk. If we consider the period in this context, there’s a notable redundancy. A period marks a break between thoughts. So does a new text message. A new chat bubble is visually distinct from its predecessor. Each bubble contains its own thoughts.
“The message break has become the default full-stop,” per journalist Max Caldwell-Harrison. In other words, the message break has become the new period. A 2007 study by linguists Naomi Baron and Rich Ling found that multi-sentence text messages often had punctuation to indicate where the sentences stopped, but less than a third of those texts used punctuation at the very end of the message. (I’d venture to guess it’s an even lower percentage today.)
There’s no need to mark the end of the thought by sending the text and including a period. It’s redundant. So, what does it mean when someone still chooses to include a period to end a text?
In 2016, psychologist Danielle Gunraj conducted a study to see how people perceived one-sentence text messages that used a period at the end of the sentence (i.e., where the period was redundant with the text ending). Gunraj found that participants perceived texts ending with periods as more insincere than those that didn’t have a period, though this perception didn’t hold for handwritten notes.
This difference in a period’s meaning between a text and a letter stems from the idea that “the medium is the message,” first proposed by media theorist Marshall McLuhan. In essence, McLuhan argues that the technology being used to convey a message is as important as the message itself. The same piece of punctuation can carry different meanings based on the medium it’s communicated through. The use of a period itself isn’t insincere: I’m using periods throughout this newsletter, and its (hopefully) not undermining my sincerity. But it’s the use of a period in a text message that becomes insincere. The medium (text) defines the message (insincerity).
Basically, the use of a period in a text undermines a sense of comfort. Its redundancy creates a tension that, to the receiver, reads as insincere because of its unnecessary formality. Per scholar David Crystal, the period in texts is being deployed as a weapon to show irony, snark, and sometimes aggression.
Dan Bilefsky has an apt example of this phenomenon in his 2016 New York Times article on the period: “If the love of your life just canceled the candlelit, six-course, home-cooked dinner you have prepared, you are best advised to include a period when you respond ‘Fine.’ to show annoyance. ‘Fine’ or ‘Fine!,’ in contrast, could denote acquiescence or blithe acceptance.”
Of course, this is all rather obvious to anyone reading this. Because there’s situational code switching at play. We talk differently with our friends over brunch than we do with our colleagues during a meeting. We write a work email differently than we write a text message. We were never formally taught how grammatical conventions differ between these situations, but we know them implicitly. We were never taught what a period means in a text message –– we’ve come to learn it from context and experience.
This embodies so much of how we learn about the world and, specifically, language. We follow those around us. We pick up on what others are doing and cue in on how people respond to our actions. This isn’t conscious learning. It’s unconscious learning. This isn’t your middle school grammar lesson on comma use. This is your day-in, day-out learning experience.
Notes.
The New York Times has written two good pieces on the use of the period: one in 2021 and one in 2016.
McLuhan’s original paper on “The Medium is the Message” can be found here.
More on periods as indicators of insincerity in texts here (which includes links to the academic research mentioned above).
John McWhorter’s TED Talk on texting and language is here.