That Grumpy Old Period
A writer wonders why we hesitate to use a period in texts and emails. Instead, we overuse exclamation points, question marks, and in less formal writing, emojis, “ha,” or “lol” to soften our message. He theorizes that “It’s the lack of context — the fact that more and more of what we communicate is aimed at somebody we don’t know or rarely speak to, with little base line of what we’re normally like.”
Students might discuss their own punctuation. Does it differ for people they know well? Are they less tentative in these situations and therefore more definitive? This might be tough to answer if they eschew punctuation entirely, as some young people do. The period has long been criticized for its finality, particularly in short texts, as in, “Sure.”—apparently meaning, to some, I will hate you forever.
In business communication, the period can be just a period, doing what it was intended to do: end a sentence. Students might develop the confidence to simply declare something.
On the other hand, we teach students to observe others in an organization and, to an extent, match communication styles. An email riddled with exclamation marks sent by a manager warrants one or two exclamation marks in return regardless of the employee’s personal style. Otherwise, exclamation points are more art than science, as the writer says:
It is widely understood that exclamation points must be inserted into the modern professional email at precise intervals—just enough to create a tone of eagerness and warmth without tipping over into sounding fake, sycophantic, or batty.
The period seems simpler, but maybe not to a student or new employee. Tone is trickly, and we don’t know each other at work as we did in the old days, when we met in person, spent time chatting over coffee, and went out after work. We could, in lieu of perfect punctuation rules, give each other the benefit of the doubt, assuming good intentions instead of overanalyzing every dot and dash.