I’m afraid I have to tell you that the full stop is dying. Period

It is now deemed to be too serious, too stuffy and lacking in sincerity. It's now being replaced by exclamation marks or emoticos.

Shiny, happy people: the range of emoticons is now enormous (iStockphoto)

A beloved punctuation mark is dying, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks to rapid-fire electronic communication, the full stop, the period, the end-of-sentence marker – whatever you call it – is struggling to retain its place in our language. We’re replacing the poor thing with exclamation marks, ellipses, line breaks and emoticons, and, in situations where none of those seems appropriate, we’re happy to leave it out altogether. The dot that Aristophanes of Byzantium bestowed upon us in 200BC is becoming superfluous; it’s now deemed to be too serious, too stuffy and lacking in sincerity.

Australian writer Simon Castles noted a while ago that the exclamation mark appeared to be “murdering” the full stop, and a survey of American students found that only 29 per cent were using them to end their messages – but its fall from favour is now backed up with scientific research. A team at the Department of Psychology at the State University of New York at Binghamton recently completed a study entitled “Texting insincerity: The role of the period in text messaging”. With the help of the university’s undergraduates, a number of messages were scored for perceived sincerity – and the results show that using a full stop is a bad way to convey heartfelt emotion. If you want your messages to be received in the spirit in which they’re sent, you’d be better off leaving sentences just hanging in mid-air. Reporting the findings of the study, The Washington Post equated the use of a full stop as “an act of psychological warfare”.

The full stop might be going out of fashion but exclamation marks are all the rage!

How did we get to this point? Texts and instant messages have replaced a great deal of voice-to-voice and face-to-face communication, and we’ve adopted various ways of adding nuance to these non-verbal mediums. We experimented with the bludgeoning force of the exclamation mark, moved on to a range of improvised smileys and now deploy emoticons in ever greater numbers, creating what’s been described as an “arms race” of embellishment and augmentation. Why use one red heart when three would do? Little wonder that using full stops to end sentences now makes you look like some kind of emotionless droid, barking instructions to friends like a drill sergeant.

The breathless, character-restricted world of modern communication does the full stop no favours, and leaving them out seems to convey an air of nonchalance, where replies seem more casual and jokes more impromptu. Having said that, people who receive messages tend to scrutinise them far more than the sender, as they work out the significance of the tiniest details. Whole theses could be written about the psychological impact of the kiss (x) and multiples thereof in instant messaging, and full stops can have a similar impact. Adding one to the sentence “I love you” can, in certain circumstances, negate the sentiment of the words preceding it, but a small emoticon of a shooting star can elevate it to a whole new level of affection.

But let’s not lose the full stop. It has its place – and context is everything; sticking one after a “No” can convey an almost terrifying sternness, but in the right situation that same full stop can have comic mileage, too. “It’s not surprising,” said the Binghamton research team’s leader, Celia Klin, “that as texting evolves, people are finding ways to convey… complex and nuanced information.” Bearing in mind that the other day I used an emoticon of a pig’s face to soften the blow of some bad news, she’s evidently right. Twitter.com/Rhodri