Instant messaging is all the rage these days and is the favorite mode of communication for most smartphone users. Just like talking, texting can also give a negative or positive impression of you to the person you are messaging with. According to a recently published study, our messages are likely to sound more insincere to the person on the other end if we end them with a period (.). In the study researchers made participants read messages that ended with and without periods, and asked them which ones sounded more sincere.
The participants answered just the way researchers had suspected, with majority of them indicating that the texts which ended with a period sounded less sincere and perhaps rude, while they were more likely to believe the ones that ended without them. Interestingly this behavior only applies to text messaging, as no such difference was found for handwritten notes.
So next time you are texting with your partner, friend or a colleague try not to follow the golden rules of grammar and be more casual in your conversations. Unless you are a jerk who does not care about what others think about him or her, in which case you can continue adding those periods at the end of each sentence.
