Why full stops make texters seem insincere

Ending a text message in this way may be correct, but it comes across as insincere, according to research.

Why your texts seem insincere

If you want to seem sincere in a text message, it doesn’t matter how many smiley faced emojis or “lols” you use, just copy this sentence and make sure to end it without a full stop

Ending a text message with a full-stop comes across as insincere, according to researchers at Binghamton University, in New York, who found that people use punctuation in digital messaging to convey tone.

It may be grammatically correct to punctuate text messages properly, but it is unusual to use full stops in digital conversations, which means that the recipient will try to work out why you took that extra split-second to add it to your SMS, and may think you are being insincere or even passive-aggressive.

The report said: “The rapid pace of texting mimics face-to-face communication, leading to the question of whether the critical non-verbal aspects of conversation, such as tone, are expressed in computer-mediated communication.

“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. No such difference was found for handwritten notes. We conclude that punctuation is one cue used by senders, and understood by receivers, to convey pragmatic and social information.”

Celia Klin, who led the study, published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, said: “Texting is lacking many of the social cues used in actual face-to-face conversations. When speaking, 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. Thus, it makes sense that texters rely on what they have available to them — emoticons, deliberate misspellings that mimic speech sounds and, according to our data, punctuation.”

She said that ending a text with an exclamation mark made the message seem more rather than less sincere.

Experts have previously suggested that full-stops in texts and other digital messages can convey anger.

Mark Liberman, a linguist, told New Republic, an American magazine, in 2013 that: “In the world of texting and instant messaging ... the default is to end just by stopping, with no punctuation mark at all.

“Choosing to add a period also adds meaning because the reader(s) need to figure out why you did it. What they infer, plausibly enough, is something like, ‘This is final, this is the end of the discussion or at least the end of what I have to contribute to it’.”

The Times