Criticism of Generation Z’s writing skills is unfair – language is an ever-evolving tool

When even a full stop speaks a thousand words, this isn’t a matter for ridicule; it’s a cause for celebration, writes Lydia Bunt

Gen Z has been criticised over the use of full stops (Getty/iStock)

If anyone takes issue with poor spelling, punctuation and grammar, it’s me. Hyphens in the place of en-dashes make me writhe, and I hate it when people use “however” after a comma.

Interning at a magazine last summer, I was mid-way through a technical explanation of why “dreamt” is now “dreamed” when I realised the whole room was laughing at me. However, as a millennial, I understand that there are exceptions to every rule – and this includes the once-rigid rudiments of punctuation.

Parts of Twitter have been in uproar over claims that young people find full stops “intimidating”. Using one at the end of a sentence potentially implies that the writer is angry, and wants to make a point of it. It’s the symbolic equivalent of raising your voice or frowning. This isn’t at all ludicrous. A quick check with the under-21s in my extended family confirmed that full stops in messaging are a no-go.

As a late millennial myself, I’ve narrowly missed the Snapchat/TikTok bandwagon and don’t rate myself a digital native per se. But I’m still wary of concluding my messages too bluntly. A kiss, emoji or blank space will do just fine – a full stop definitely won’t.

“We can’t even use a simple dot anymore!” the woke-weary hordes cry in response. But to start with, we’re not necessarily talking about punctuation as used in standard writing here. This horror of full stops predominantly applies to the realm of social media and instant messaging, where the hard-and-fast rules of spelling, grammar and punctuation cannot always apply.

Young people aren’t forgoing full stops in their school essays or university papers. We even put them in emails, you know. But ending a text, Facebook message or Snap with a full stop understandably seems harsh in a medium where brevity and speed are key.

In some cases, grammatical fluidity is working its magic beyond the smartphone screen, proving that punctuation is gaining in nuance. Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker-winning novel Girl, Woman, Other eschews standardised punctuation for a looser style. This clearly does not indicate grammatical inadequacy. Rather, Evaristo fields a derisive nod at the grammatical establishment, a play for change that aligns with her attempts to increase the visibility of black British women in literature.

If punctuation can be intentionally manipulated in literary prose, we shouldn’t be surprised by its flexibility in the fluid world of social media. Ergo, punctuation can still have rules, but if you can’t tell the difference between a mistake and a nuance, you’re just being petty.

As this Twitter storm has shown, punctuation pedants will continually bemoan the death of tradition. But social media and instant messaging aren’t killing punctuation off – only changing it. Smartphones in hand, Generation Z are teasing out nuances in a once-hermetic system of signs.

The changing meaning of the full stop indicates how sentence structure develops, much as we see new words like “selfie” or “twerking” pop up in the Oxford English Dictionary. Language is supposed to be a reflection of the society that uses it, so why shouldn’t punctuation play the same role? If elder generations deny its newfound nuances, this can only be a classic example of resistance to change.

Allegedly, the youth of today are the “snowflake” generation – we are offended by everything, down to the paltry full stop. But instead of mocking Gen Z for their (actually quite advanced) understanding of punctuation symbols, we should instead try to understand why the connotations of those symbols have changed.

Is the growing meaning of the full stop not just a testament to the prowess of our present systems of communication? When even a small dot speaks a thousand words, this isn’t a matter for ridicule; it’s a cause for celebration.