A Word, Please: A period of declining punctuation

Fine. Sure. Yes. No. Hardly. Whatever.

In a longer piece of writing like an article, blog post or even email, periods are usually necessary. They show the reader where one thought ends and another begins.

But what if you have only one brief thought to convey? For example, if you want to give a one- or two-word response to a text message such as “I hope you don’t mind I drank the last of the French roast.”

MORE: Read past columns on all things grammar from June Casagrande >>

If that’s fine with you, you might text back “Fine” without a period. You save a keystroke and your message will be right on target. But what if you tack a period on the end of your one-word text message?

Fine.

Well, you just might be sending out a vibe you never intended. Insincere. Exasperated. Snarky, even. In other words, maybe not so fine.

That’s what researchers at Binghamton University in New York and Rutgers University in New Jersey recently discovered. They asked 126 undergraduate students to look at text messages and handwritten notes with single-word responses like “Fine” and “Sure.” Then they asked them to assess the messages.

The text messages that ended with periods, students said, came off as less sincere, while in the handwritten notes periods made no difference in perceived tone.

“It is not necessary to use a period in a text message, so to make something explicit that is already implicit makes a point of it,” linguist Geoffrey Nunberg told the New York Times. “It’s like when you say, ‘I am not going — period.’ It’s a mark. It can be aggressive. It can be emphatic. It can mean, ‘I have no more to say.’”

Twitter, it seems, is fueling this trend. When you’re allowed no more than 140 characters, the only punctuation marks likely to make the cut are those that help the reader get the message. A message like, for example, passive-aggressive exasperation.

These latest revelations recently inspired the New York Times to proclaim that the death of the period may soon be at hand. “The period — the full-stop signal we all learn as children, whose use stretches back at least to the Middle Ages — is gradually being felled in the barrage of instant messaging that has become synonymous with the digital age.”

As a former reporter intimately familiar with the process of pitching a story idea and hoping it makes the paper, let me be the first to say: “Nah.”

Yes, punctuation is on the decline in ultra-short electronic communiques because there it’s impractical. But in longer documents such as articles, books and multisentence emails, the period is so practical that I have no doubt it’ll be around for a long time.

The comma has bigger problems. As a copy editor, every day I must assess punctuation in sentences like “Sometime in the near future, we will see big changes.” So I take notice of how other editors punctuate. I’ve noticed that nonessential commas are seriously out of vogue: “Sometime in the near future we will see big changes” seems a far more popular approach.

When you read the New Yorker — an anomaly among modern publications in that it never saw a comma it didn’t like — you see how odd lots of commas can look.

Of course, only optional commas are on the outs. Commas used to separate adjectives, as in “my blue, green and yellow print shirt,” aren’t optional. Commas that separate nondefining clauses are equally crucial. Compare “Woman, without her, man is nothing” to “Woman without her man is nothing” and you’ll see what I mean.

Punctuation was born of a need to better understand what writers are trying to tell us. As long as commas and periods help us communicate, they’re not going anywhere.

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JUNE CASAGRADE is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.