Why punctuation MATTERS.

Facebook, the company which is responsible you Instagram, Oculus, and WhatsApp, is now responsible for FACEBOOK – what does this mean?

In case you missed it, Facebook (the company) decided to rebrand its flagship product as FACEBOOK, in order to differentiate the platform from the company.

[Facebook GIF]

It’s a pretty bold move, given that most people associate capitalisation with ANGER – an emotion the company is garnering a lot of at the moment.

To be fair, the spacing in between the letters lessens this effect, but it’s still a pretty divisive change.

Facebook has a small army of copy and advertising folks who would have been working at this re-brand feverishly for months on end, so it’s reasonable to assume that the change has been thought through.

And it’s not like the company couldn’t use a rebrand at the moment to help differentiate its most popular platform with the company constantly in the headlines for the wrong reasons.

But, I’m not entirely sure this will stop people linking bad news stories about Facebook to FACEBOOK.

But what this has done has given me pause to think about punctuation and the way it continues to evolve, and what it means for audiences – and what role technology has played in how punctuation is perceived.

Once upon a time…

Capitalisation wasn’t seen as all that aggressive.

It was seen as a way to make a word stand out, or a way to demonstrate an acronym.

But the adoption of email as the most common form of correspondence has changed the game for capitalisation, and for a whole bunch of other grammar.

Communication via text, previous to this point, was considered. It needed to be written down and physically sent to another person, which does tend to help take emotion out of text.

However, the ability to send text-based messages in real-time means the gap between writing a letter and sending it off is considerably shorter.

It gives less time for the better self to kick in and self-censor, so more emotion made it into communication.

Punctuation which would never make it onto paper, all of a sudden, made it into emails.

Emotion-led punctuation such as the double-question mark made it into emails:

I thought I asked you to do this??

The exclamatory question mark put a whole new urgency around questions?

When will I receive my order!?

And, of course, the use of capitalisation to emphasise anger (when the writer wants to make sure the reader really sees their point) evolved.

I asked for my order to be filled TWO DAYS AGO. This is simply UNNACCEPTABLE.

But, these are fairly extreme examples.

There’s another example of punctuation which has evolved as a function of tech evolving which fascinates me: the humble full stop.

Allow me to be blunt.

This isn’t necessarily new, but it’s still fascinating to think about as a function of punctuation being influenced by tech.

A 2016 study gave students a bunch of text messages to analyse, with some messages containing a full stop, and others not containing a full stop after a sentence.

It turns out that most participants in that study found full stops in text messages to be borderline aggressive.

Specifically, the study found:

When the exchanges appeared as text messages, the responses that ended with a period were rated as less sincere than those that did not end with a period. No such difference was found for handwritten notes. We conclude that punctuation is one cue used by senders, and understood by receivers, to convey pragmatic and social information.

It turns out that short text messages, which can be sent in near-instantaneous time, has evolved perception of written grammar again.

Because texters didn’t use the full stop for informal messages (because it was seen as a waste of time), they saw messages which had a full stop as formal, because the texter had taken the time to put in a full stop.

When a full stop is presented, subconsciously, the reader asks why the full stop was attached. It’s seen as blunt and formal in a medium which is defined by friendly and informal communication.

As linguist Gretchen McColloch put it:

"If you're a young person and you're sending a message to someone, the default way to break up your thoughts is to send each thought as a new message.”

"Because the minimum thing necessary to send is the message itself, anything additional you include can take on an additional interpretation."

 It’s why one of the key tenants of UX writing is to be very careful about full stops in sentences which could conceivably be read on a mobile screen.

Technology is constantly evolving the way audiences read content, and what points of punctuation and grammar are going the way of the dodo (I’m looking at you, whom and semi-colons).

But this is just one man’s ranting – what points of grammar or punctuation do you think are on the way out?