Is this the end for the full stop?

Young people, raised on texts and emails, find the full stop somewhat blunt and rude.Picture: istock

Trigger warning. Are. You. Offended. By. This. Sentence? Or sentences, I should say. Do you find full stops passive-aggressive? When you come across a tiny dot at the end of a sentence, do you feel affronted, have an itch to fire off a complaint because your sensibilities have been offended by the bullying ways of that annoying little mark? Hypersensitive young people are now making their voices heard over this staple of punctuation that’s been with us since the Ancient Greeks. According to a recent Twitter storm, younger people are now finding the full stop somewhat blunt and rude, especially in the text messages they’ve been raised on, or in a social media context, or an email chat.

Crime novelist Sophie Hannah weighed in to the illuminating debate. “Just asked 16-year-old son – apparently this is true. If he got a message with full stops at the end of sentences he’d think the sender was “weird, mean or too blunt”. A teenager close to hand explains, patiently, that his generation tends to communicate separate thoughts in separate texts. They don’t send longish texts with many thoughts broken up by those weird little dot things in the middle of them; and full stops can now mean that someone’s annoyed at you. Offence taken.

At this point he looks at me oddly, annoyed, like: what planet am I on that I don’t get this? I try to explain that the dear little full stop has been hanging around innocently since the third century BC, introduced by Aristophanes of Byzantium to indicate the amount of breath needed when reading sentences aloud. Time to go, says his face, non-caring.

Celia Klin is a professor of psychology at Binghamton University in New York and has studied how US college students now perceive the full stop. “Readers found responses without the period (full stop) to be more positive, more enthusiastic – and the version with the period to be less sincere, more abrupt, less positive. The types of conversations people often have digitally depend on the type of nuanced meaning that has traditionally been expressed with tone of voice, facial expressions, hand gestures and pauses. Without the ability to use these cues, people have created new ways to make their messages clear.”

So there you have it. As our backs bow over phones and our faces disappear into screens and shy from greeting the world, the meaning of our punctuation morphs. It becomes emotion, conveys meaning in ways it was never intended to and quite possibly attacks. And so the young bend our grammar to their sensitivities, or even eliminate it, but will the rest of the world follow suit?

Let’s not get too snowflakey over this – my view is that full stops have to be taken on the chin. Effective writing is all about rhythm, and they’re a chief component of a literary toolbox. Young people, I suspect, will just have to accept the full stop’s ubiquity.

It’s similar to the conversation that periodically crops up in these parts about school teachers who may not be liked. Get real, I tell my kids, this is how the world works. Consider your teachers your bosses, and in your adult life there’ll invariably be some they don’t like. That’s just the way it is. And it’s up to them to learn to rub along with others, to be a diplomat and never convey that dislike. Because in the real world those teachers/bosses have the power to hire and fire, to not give you that job or promotion, and you have to learn to respect that.

And my solution to the younger generation’s aversion to the full stop? When I’m irked I now use that humble mark to chilling effect in text messages – the grammatical equivalent of raising the voice in the dreaded mother tone. Who would have thought that an innocent little dot could wield so much power?