#!;@? punctuation

From Stuff

Ending your texts with a full stop is truly monstrous. We all know this. Grammar be darned, it just doesn’t look friendly.

Now a study has confirmed it. Researchers led by Binghamton University’s Celia Klin report that text messages ending with a full stop are perceived as being less sincere, probably because the people sending them are heartless.

Or from The Wireless, which at least knows what ‘grammar’ means:

Researchers at the University of Binghamton in the US have released a study concluding that the full stop is evil. Or, in their own words: “Inclusion of a sentence-final period in text messages affects readers’ perception of the sincerity of the messages”. 

The quote is correct; that is what the researchers said! But as graphics guru Edward Tufte points out, one of the characteristics of numbers is that they have a magnitude as well as a direction!

How evil is the full stop? Well, assuming the people you text have the same assumptions about writing as undergraduate students in upstate New York, the following graph gives a picture! These are two Normal distributions with the mean and variance that the researchers found for messages with and without a full stop!

Truly monstrous and evil!!

The press release also says

In some very recent follow-up work, Klin’s team found that a text response with an exclamation mark is interpreted as more, rather than less, sincere.

That’s a relief!!!!