Full stops in texts make you look insincere

A study has found that text messages ending with a full stop will make the sender look insincere. Photo / iStock

Ending your text message with a full stop will make you look insincere, according to a new study.

The study, conducted by Binghamton University, has found that text messages ending with a full stop will make the sender look insincere.

News.com.au reported that during the experiment, participants were made to read short exchanges with varying use of the full stop. When the exchanges appeared as texts, the responses ending with a full stop were deemed less sincere than those that didn't.

Celia Klin, who headed the study, explained that text messaging lacks many social cues used in face-to-face conversations. Therefore, message senders have to make the most of everything that is supplied to them - emoticons, misspellings and, apparently, punctuation.

"Punctuation is used and understood by texters to convey emotions and other social and pragmatic information," she said.

"Given that people are wonderfully adept at communicating complex and nuanced information in conversations, it's not surprising that as texting evolves, people are finding ways to convey the same types of information in their texts."

The study found that using full stops at the end of a sentence can also be construed as a passive-aggressive symbol, especially when used multiple times in a single message.

Linguist expert Mark Liberman told New Republic that a full stop could lead the recipient to think something was wrong.

"In the world of texting and instant messaging ... the default is to end just by stopping, with no punctuation mark at all," he explained.

"Choosing to add a period also adds meaning because the reader(s) need to figure out why you did it. What they infer, plausibly enough, is something like 'This is final, this is the end of the discussion or at least the end of what I have to contribute to it'."