The message beyond the HN title actually has potential. However, the author focuses in some odd places for me. As far as punctuation, ending periods actually have negative emotion in text vernacular now for younger audiences and should almost never be used in 1-1 messaging. Exclamation points, commas, and question marks, great! For abbreviations, it's simply know your audience. You should use them when everyone in th…
I regularly use sad emojis when I let my boss know I just screwed something up in production. For celebrations we use giphy.
I feel like people complaining about this didn't grow up in the IRC/IM era. It probably depends on your corp's culture as well, but for us, Slack is a very informal communcation mechanism. If you need to write something formal, you use an email. Slack is equivalent to shouting out to the room (as if you were there in person).
I definitely grew up in the IRC/IM era and continue to run one of the larger IRC networks in the world... But people using proper sentence structure and 'all in one' messages are often the people you want to talk to.
There are some people who basically braindump many lines of text with no punctuation but they are not the most common and it's a signal that the person does not respect the room- so they are somewhat scorned even if not directly.
Same, but not sure why now that you mention it. I'm a stickler for grammar, oxford commas and all, but in messaging, periods feel...rude at times. I can't explain why, perhaps it is the 'conclusion in thought' aspect.
This discussion is really confusing me. Are people talking about periods being negative when used anywhere? when used in the last sentence in a multi-sentence message? when used at the end of a single sentence/thought message? Confused.
I suspect people are talking about periods being negative specifically in IM/text message contexts, like Slack, where "send message" has taken over the role of period and period has morphed into an extra signal for something like "finality."
100% agree about ending periods. I always read those messages as being irritated or overly firm. Potentially worse, though, are people who have a habit of abusing ellipses (...) in weird places. My boss does this in virtually every sentence, sometimes multiple times, and it always comes off like he can't believe you'd say something so stupid
I am not sure why would you think that... If a period is to make a statement firmer, ellipsis does it triple... Like that, right? ;)
...I have a coworker who starts nearly every sentence thus so, as if continuing from the last sentence, even if you haven't talked to him in a few days.
I feel like people complaining about this didn't grow up in the IRC/IM era. It probably depends on your corp's culture as well, but for us, Slack is a very informal communcation mechanism. If you need to write something formal, you use an email. Slack is equivalent to shouting out to the room (as if you were there in person).
I think it's less about formalism than it is about clear communication. People will also be confused if you shout out a message to the room without appropriate pauses (commas or periods) or without the right tone (question marks).
But that's the thing, if you ever used IM for a significant amount of time, you know you don't need punctuation. Question marks, yes, he's right about that.. but I certainly don't add periods at the end of every five word chat post. Maybe if you're writing a paragraph in Slack go for it, but if I have a few sentences to say I'll usually just send them in a few messages instead. This whole idea of writing formal multi-sentence messages in Slack shows the author's dissonance with how real-time-chat is supposed to work (keeping in mind that Slack is supposed to be next-generation-corp-IRC).
Agreed. My mentor Charles taught me: "engineers are humans too, they deserve proper English, so write proper English in your code comments". This kind of empathy gave humanity and warmth to the NeXT and Apple products he worked on.
As someone of the younger generation who grew up always using mostly proper punctuation over texts, and avoided abbreviations for common terms this hits home. I'm 28 for reference, and I get VERY different vibes from those younger than me who join slack, and those older (40+ or so). The difference in meaning for different punctuation for these crowds is SO evident, I feel like I'm always playing translator for even t…
I'm 20 and I've noticed how true this is. I find myself "code switching" depending on who I'm messaging at work.
I've had a few profs that would the ellipsis for every single sentence, and my brain subconsciously treated his emails as mysterious. It's not too bad once you get used to it.
There's also the weird thing of younger people like myself avoiding proper punctuation/capitalization for the aesthetic. Mainly because a lack of proper writing can make certain messages feel more "relaxed" and casual, if that makes sense.
The message beyond the HN title actually has potential. However, the author focuses in some odd places for me. As far as punctuation, ending periods actually have negative emotion in text vernacular now for younger audiences and should almost never be used in 1-1 messaging. Exclamation points, commas, and question marks, great! For abbreviations, it's simply know your audience. You should use them when everyone in th…
100% agree about ending periods. I always read those messages as being irritated or overly firm. Potentially worse, though, are people who have a habit of abusing ellipses (...) in weird places. My boss does this in virtually every sentence, sometimes multiple times, and it always comes off like he can't believe you'd say something so stupid
I often interpret ellipses at the end of a sentence as an inability to express oneself in a written form.
It's pretty common with people I know born from 1980 and beyond. Of course, it gets more common the closer their year of birth is to the aughts. But I guess you are right, everyone doing it today was under 20 at some point.
As someone born in the late 80s I've only heard about it from the press. I really sometimes omit periods in one-sentence text messages, but sometimes I don't, and it wouldn't come to my mind to ascribe any semantics to this. My personal nitpick is people writing a stream of one-sentence messages without punctuation instead of a longer structured message - that definitely carries the connotation of unstructured thinki…
Unstructured messages in a serious place is annoying, yes, but in a water cooler area it can set a more relaxed tone. It's a cultural thing and I'd never force someone to endure my style of communication in a place where it's not welcome.
I think this entire post can be distilled into the following: The time you spend composing a message should be proportional to the number of people in your intended audience.
I remember a quote from Blaise Pascal's (if my memory serves me right) letter going something like "apologies for the long letter, but I lack the time to make it shorter".