If Aziz Ansari's Master of None taught us anything (it actually taught us everything), it's that the post-texting dating world is often a cold and lonely wasteland of perpetual shadiness. As our language continues to evolve into just a bunch of emoji, the intentions behind seemingly simple notions like a period at the end of a sentence are suddenly a matter of debate. Also, what's punctuation?
According to science, it's apparently something that seemingly mean people do for reasons not entirely clear. Computers in Human Behavior recently published a study that shows people who send texts with periods are viewed far less than favorably. 126 college students were recruited by researchers at Binghamton University to read a series of texts and some handwritten notes. The oft-maligned "Yup." was thrown into a mix of words like "Okay" and "Yeah" to form a nice variety of one-word responses.
Though "no such difference" was found in the series of handwritten notes, researchers did conclude that punctuation is a cue used between senders and receivers to "convey pragmatic and social information." According to their findings, the period has more than maintained its reputation:
Participants read short exchanges in which the response either did or did not include a sentence-final period. When the exchanges appeared as text messages, the responses that ended with a period were rated as less sincere than those that did not end with a period
Given the fact that Shia LaBeouf recently confirmed to the planet that sincerity is in fact "the new punk rock," it is with little hesitance we offer this:
RIP punctuation
