The period as we know it is dying. That's really not so bad.
The ends of sentences today are often lacking in periods, purposefully left open to appendage, response or silence. We avoid hitting the period key whenever possible, because periods don't just end sentences, they have meaning.
When you tell a friend something via text message, getting a reply that reads "Ok." instead of "Ok" is no longer just a meaningless difference in punctuation. The period adds emotion; it's an intentional addition that demands further interpretation, as noted recently by the New York Times.
The death of the full stop period
Before AOL Instant Messenger and its ilk, one sentence usually followed another. Now, common correspondence is much more rapid, and most people just send one sentence or thought at a time to one another.
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The border of the word bubble replaced the period
Sure, there are times when we type up a short paragraph with a few periods sprinkled, but for the most part our messages are short and concise. There's no real need to mark the end of those sentences because hitting Enter or send gets that point across.
The border of the word bubble replaced the period.
Through instant messaging, the period was systematically removed from single sentences in Internetese. As social media crept into existence, the lack of periods stuck around.
When brevity is present, periods are absent. Why waste one of your precious 140 characters on a period?
The new period
Most people are well-aware of the difference between receiving a "Fine." and a "Fine" as a text. The former has a quality of finality to it, as if the period is a stand-in for "Don't ask me to elaborate," while the latter could simply mean "Fine" without any baggage.
In a 2015 study titled "Texting insincerely: The role of the period in text messaging," researchers at Binghamton University showed 126 students different affirmative responses to questions -- some had punctuation, some had none. The study found that responses with periods like "Yup." or "Sure." were rated as less sincere than the same responses minus a period.
Writer and professor David Crystal detailed to the New York Times how the period has changed from just signifying the end of a sentence in digital conversations.
“The period now has an emotional charge and has become an emoticon of sorts,” Crystal told the Times. “In the 1990s the Internet created an ethos of linguistic free love where breaking the rules was encouraged and punctuation was one of the ways this could be done.”
It's no longer noticeable when someone doesn't use a period at the end of a sentence because we're just so accustomed to not seeing it.
The new period is like the old exclamation point: They have meaning and are used sparingly.
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