4 ms·
> When you're writing small, short sentences, there is something off putting about periods. Well, that may be the case for some people, but I am not convinced
by Jedd 6y ago
> When you're writing small, short sentences, there is something off putting about periods.
Well, that may be the case for some people, but I am not convinced it's the general case.
Also, how do you write (delineate, identify, etc) small, short sentences without periods?
I'm assuming people in a hurry - that don't have time for punctuation - do have time for tautological constructs? (small, short) ; )
- neodymiumphish 6y agoI see it done that way a lot where each small sentence is its own message. Even more annoyingly, they often do it in a main channel on Slack after the message they're responding to, instead of "replying in thread".
- mjayhn 6y agoPurely anecdotal but I think it’s from irc/aim users (a lot of millennials/genx including myself) since long form communication wasn’t really a thing on there. I see some people write paragraphs as messages on discord servers and iirc that wasn’t technically even possible on irc and I feel like it’s even strange to see in the middle of lighter chatter. Also slack threads are awful, imo. I can appreciate them in certain contexts like asking what tool everyone likes or where to grab dinner, but if your slack has become a place where complicated tech answers wind up in threads it makes searching so frustrating just due to the UX. Also they’re limited, or were, on features (code blocks never looked right, etc). I HATED when outages wound up in a slack thread and not a room which was too frequent at my last employer. That #tagging/#threading feature available on the other slack/discord/teams competitor I can’t think of right now is something I really want. I have to pay attention to not treating slack like irc quite a bit.
- jlokier 6y ago> Also, how do you write (delineate, identify, etc) small, short sentences without periods? oh that's easy you just write one short sentence at a time like this :-)
- Twisol 6y agoWorth noting that this carries a lot better in a medium like IRC or Slack, where the message framing implies an "end" in its own right. It looks a little strange in an HN comment, because they all come in the same single message.
- Jedd 6y agoAha - so you're using CR's to denote end of sentences rather than periods, which would be an interesting evolution for the (written) language. Grouping related thoughts / points as sentences within a single paragraph still feels more right to me than trying to over-succinctify potentially complex concepts into tiny paragraphs.
- bccdee 6y agoLanguage actually changes like this a lot, and it's really interesting ... Back a good 70 years ago, ellipses were commonly used for this in informal mediums such as postcards ... It leads to a very different-feeling messages ... Heard it on a podcast about how the internet has changed grammar [1] [1]: https://www.earwolf.com/episode/how-the-internet-is-transforming-language-with-gretchen-mcculloch/ https://www.earwolf.com/episode/how-the-internet-is-transfor...
- Aeolun 6y agoPlease never do this in Slack though. Unless all of your statements carry a different topic, that should be one message.
- finolex1 6y agoIn my experience this is pretty much a universal norm for all Americans below 30. Putting a period at the end of a sentence may come across as curt or rude. Note: Rules are different for multi-sentence messages and single sentence messages. For messages with multiple sentences, its fine to insert periods between all sentences, but skip the last one. The above only applies to short messages with a single sentence.
- Jedd 6y agoI know that historically, newspaper headlines were lengthier, and quite likely to be a grammatically valid sentence. However, periods were never used to end them, as absent a period it invited the reader to actually engage with the rest of the story. (This story may be apocryphal, but it sounds reasonable.) Perhaps there's a little of that going on with people's communications where they wish to imply there exists more than they are saying (which may or may not ultimately be delivered to the reader). For my part - as an over-30 non-American - I'll stick with standard punctuation.
- fractionalhare 6y agoIf the message is long enough to actually have multiple sentences, each individual sentence has a period. The last sentence simply drops the period. It's not the use of periods on a per-sentence basis, it's just the last period. For certain demographics this evokes a tone of abrupt and unfriendly finality. But it depends on context.