Therefore, you should not exit text messages with punctuation – Dagbladet.no

A group of researchers at the University of Binghamton has studied how punctuation affects the recipient’s perception of text messages. The surveys indicate that the message is perceived as more sincere if you fail to end with a period.

The research group, led by Celia Klin, recruited 126 students who studied a series of text messages and handwritten notes.

In 16 of the cases contained sender’s message a question, such as “Dave gave me some extra tickets. Do you want to join?”. The recipients responded in monosyllables like “Okay,” “Sure,” “Yeah” and “Yup.”

The students got to see two versions of answers, both with and without sentence. They concluded that the responses without sentence seemed more sincere in SMS messages.

In the handwritten notes amounted sentence no difference.

– Text messages lacks many of the social cues that occur in a conversation face to face. When you talk to people, they can easily pick up facial expressions, tone of voice, pauses and the like, says Klin in a statement.

– These are mechanisms that you obviously can not use in an SMS. Thus, the recipient of a text message to lean on, among other emoticons and punctuation.

The research group also on how the use of exclamation was interpreted. It turns out that while sentence allows your message to be interpreted less sincere, leading exclamation that it interpreted more sincere.

– It is not surprising, but it strengthens our findings, says Klin.

study is published in Computers in Human Behavior.