Background of the Study

Writing formally in English is more than just choosing the right words in the right order.

Using punctuation in your writing helps the reader to clearly understand the message that is

being conveyed. Punctuation primarily helps to indicate the pauses and the emphasis on certain

ideas or thoughts that are discussed in the text. Punctuation helps us to structure, and thus to

understand, texts. Many uses of punctuation straddle the line between syntax and discourse,

because they serve to combine multiple propositions within a single orthographic sentence. They

allow us to insert discourse-level relations at the level of a single sentence { Doran, Christine D

1998).People have begun noticing slight changes to the way our smallest punctuation mark is

deployed, When it comes to texting, the period has been getting a lot of attention.

Text messaging is a conversation that involves a lot of back-and-forth, people add fillers

as a way to mimic spoken language. We see this with the increased use of ellipses, which can

invite the recipient to continue the conversation. The period is the opposite of that a definitive

stop that signals. (Mark Liberman) explained, “This is final, this is the end of the discussion.”

(Naomi Baron and Rich Ling) stated that multi-sentence text messages often had punctuation to

indicate where the sentences stopped, In their 2007 study, Baron and Ling explained that “the act

of sending a message coincides with sentence-final punctuation.”.

The period is merely one example of this shift, a change that has opened up new

possibilities for communicating with written language. Just as we have different styles of

speaking in different situations, so do we have context-dependent styles of writing. Though

periods can still signal the end of a sentence in a text message, many users will omit them.

Ending your texts with a period is truly monstrous. We all know this. Grammar be darned, it just

doesn't look friendly. A study has confirmed it. Researchers, led by Binghamton University's
Celia Klin, report that text messages ending with a period are perceived as being less sincere,

probably because the people sending them are heartless.

"Text messaging is one of the most frequently used computer-mediated communication

(CMC) methods. The rapid pace of texting mimics face-to-face communication, leading to the

question of whether the critical non-verbal aspects of conversation, such as tone, are expressed in

CMC," the researchers write in the study. According to Klin and her fellow researchers, that's an

indication that the text message period has taken on a life of its own. It is no longer just the

correct way to end a sentence. It's an act of psychological warfare against your friends. In follow-

up research that hasn't yet been published, they saw signs that exclamation points once a rather

uncouth punctuation mark may make your messages seem more sincere than no punctuation at

all.

Statement of the Problem

In contrast with face-to-face conversations, text messages lack extra-linguistic cues such as tone of voice

and gestures. We explore the hypothesis that textisms, such as irregular punctuation, are used to fill this

role. We extend the work of Gunraj, Drumm-Hewitt, Dashow, Upadhyay, and Klin (2016) who found that

the inclusion of a period after a positive one-word response (e.g., yeah.) led readers to perceive the

response as less sincere.

This study aims to answer the question “What is the role of period in a converstion for students?”

Specifically, the study seeks to answer the following question:

1.

2.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320746903_Punctuation_in_text_messages_may_convey_a

bruptness_Period [accessed Aug 08 2018].