Using full stops on WhatsApp makes people think you’re rude, internet linguist warns
ENDING your sentences with full stops on WhatsApp will make pals think you're rude, linguists have warned.
Even though your punctuation is perfect, experts now say the text you're sending will seem "passive aggressive".
Full stops date back around 2,300 years and are essential to modern English.
But internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch says that youngsters now see the full stop as a sign of rudeness.
"If you're a young person and you're sending a message to someone, the default way to break up your thoughts is to send each thought as a new message," she told the .
"Because the minimum thing necessary to send is the message itself, anything additional you include can take on an additional interpretation."
Gretchen isn't wrong: a 2015 Binghamton University study found that uni students perceived text messages with full stops as "less sincere" than those without.
According to Gretchen, it's because full stops in speech indicate the end of a sentence – and signal formality or seriousness.
"This can be fine if your message is already serious," Gretchen explained.
"The problem comes when you have a positive message with the seriousness of the full stop.
"It's the juxtaposition of those things which creates that sense of passive aggression."
What makes the situation difficult is that it's tricky to tell whether or not someone is actually annoyed.
The best way to work it out is to look at the wider context of the message, according to Erika Darics, a linguistics lecturer at Aston University.
"If you and your friends don't normally use full stops in a WhatsApp group and then somebody does, they are probably trying to tell you something about how they feel," Erika said.
WhatsApp – a quick history
Here's what you need to know...
- WhatsApp was created in 2009 by computer programmers Brian Acton and Jan Koum - former employees of Yahoo
- It's one of the most popular messaging services in the world
- Koum came up with the name WhatsApp because it sounded like "what's up"
- After a number of tweaks the app was released with a messaging component in June 2009, with 250,000 active users
- It was originally free but switched to a paid service to avoid growing too fast. Then in 2016, it became free again for all users
- Facebook bought WhatsApp Inc in February 2014 for $19.3billion (£14.64bn)
- The app is particularly popular because all messages are encrypted during transit, shutting out snoopers
- As of January 2018, WhatsApp has over 1.5billion users globally
She explained that younger people are now much more likely to send single-sentence texts with no full stop.
It's all down to the fact that it's hard to convey emotion without body language or tone of voice.
And rather than lazily relying on autocorrect and predictive text, youngsters will use dodgy grammar, spelling or slang to show their meaning.
"Going back to the 1500s there have been proposals for an irony punctuation mark but none of those caught on," said Gretchen.
"But within a few short decades of being online we've come up with so many ways of conveying irony and other meaning."
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In other WhatsApp news, don't click the text offering you 1,000GB of free internet.
Last month, we reported on how 25million WhatsApp users have fake "hacked" versions of the app installed.
And we recently revealed the full list of 111 popular Android apps that may be destroying your battery life.
Do you think using full stops on WhatsApp is rude, or just good practice? Let us know in the comments!
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