A case for using punctuation in Slack
blog.mitchjlee.com
blog.mitchjlee.com
As far as punctuation, ending periods actually have negative emotion in text vernacular now for younger audiences and should almost never be used in 1-1 messaging. Exclamation points, commas, and question marks, great!
For abbreviations, it's simply know your audience. You should use them when everyone in the room knows them, but you have to think about that first before use. The step of thinking about it is a great mental step to add, but the article presents it more as a steadfast rule. Also, expanding them in parentheses can be a chance to educate your audience for the future even when you have people who don't know, like I'll do below :P
To me, the smallest point was actually the most interesting and valuable, and it was skated over entirely - communicating emotion and sentiment, particularly through emoji use. With WFH (Work From Home) especially, communicating emotion is very socially helpful. I've found a lot of engineers think "well I don't care/need so I'll skip the flowery additions for efficiency" and then leave many non-tech people and some engineering coworkers to decipher if this random slack ask is mad, passive aggressive, inquisitive, or a check-in. This has far worse effects longterm often than an unknown acronym.
Adding emojis can solve this, or if you don't like those, literally giving more social context in words can also do the trick. When we're talking in person, we always communicate emotion, even when it's not the primary purpose. I think many would do well to include that in their online messaging as well :)
Like that, right? ;)
At the end, though, you're still making a judgement about someone with very little information and you have a choice not to do that.
What I really have trouble with is that we all admit it's most likely a faulty interpretation, but we still expect the other person to manage it for us. If everyone gave each other the benefit of the doubt more, none of this would be necessary.
In communication, your opinion of how something will be interpreted is far less important than opinions of the people doing the interpretation. You can stand firm in believing that adding the period doesn't make your message more hostile, but that won't change how your readers feel.
I am really curious how this evolved, and how I missed it being something people think. My biases tend to lean towards viewing people who don't use punctuation and capitalization as being less professional. I couldn't care less in something like a random chat in discord. But for Slack, as a work tool, I prefer to stay "professional".
I wonder what other seemingly unspoken biases are out there? Especially in a time where we are spending much more time in text instead of in person.
A lot of it has to be context. If I'm talking to someone new, I'm going to try very hard to read very little into the text they've sent me. If it's a message from my partner -- yeah, every aspect of that message can communicate something to me. And in that latter case, a period on a short statement is a warning sign equivalent to passive-aggressive "I'm fine."
Another thought is it literally changes how I read a sentence. Considering "I'm fine." vs "I'm fine" vs "I'm fine...", the first ends abruptly and is cut off. The second ends more gently and naturally. And the last trails off implying...something depending on the person and context. Consider poetry. No punctuation, a comma, a dash, a semi-colon, or a period each imply a type of pause (or lack of pause) at that moment in the words. And in poetry, that can mean everything.
I know another person in this thread mentioned a study about short (one word) responses being interpreted differently based on punctuation, or lack thereof. But that doesn't appear to have studied full sentences with or without.
With your example, I am basically blind to the existence of the period. So "I'm fine." vs "I'm fine" are identical in my interpretation. Or at least they were before today. The ellipsis does register as a trailing thought, and I definitely read meaning into that.
To me, a sentence should normally end in a period. However, due to the informality of chat, it is acceptable to leave off in the final sentence of a message. It being there vs not being there has never conveyed a meaning to me. I really would like to know how many things people were meaning, which I missed because of this. Or if people are interpreting my inclusion of standard punctation, with no meaning, as something more.
2013 is new.
When you say:
> because experience generally proves out most people only use a period in a single statement message if they're emphasizing firmness
I suspect your experience is with one crowd, and older people's experience is not as much with that crowd. Furthermore, older people simply have a lot more experience by virtue of being older, so that statement is simply not true for them.
Texting and IM is more common amongst the younger crowd, so conventions are going to be more weighted towards their preferences. But the notion of a period being used for emphasis is limited to that crowd. For the majority of the population (and perhaps including those who are non-native English speakers), putting a period at the end is fairly normal, and considered correct.
Language is dynamic, so I don't doubt that in 20 years I'll be "wrong".
That's a large assumption without knowing a thing about me. Though I exist in a bubble as everyone else. Age with internet chatting is interesting because no matter how old you are, there is actually a finite amount of experience anyone alive today could have with it. There's a large age block that irrespective of the individual age probably have about the same level of experience with chat (i.e. starting on usenet/IRC and staying with it all until now). Oh, I know some fortran. Still wanna guess my age?
I'm going to re-emphasize a point I made earlier that invalidates any age-based arguments: Poetry. The conventions of interpreting far more meaning from punctuation than a reader tends to from long form prose have been around far longer than anyone alive today.
I've been online since the mid-80s and also only learned about this period thing this year. So, no matter how old this convention is, it seems to have been in a minority until recently.
Same here.
That's the thing - you almost never do.
> How you interpret those is absolutely a choice
The crux of the problem here is putting that choice on the reader instead of leaving them without one. Communicating emotion in text solves this issue of interpretation.
And that's where things get difficult - at least in non-interactive environments. I've become very wary of the thousands of slight misinterpretations that my email messages might allow, and tend to rewrite most sentences once or twice to make the wording as unmistakable as possible (usually in a cycle of "how could this sentence be interpreted uncharitably?" -> fix it up).
With increasing daily email volumes I've had to tone that practice down (at least for less delicate messages) to get anything done at all. But you never really know how something was perceived unless it went really wrong.
If my boss chucks an ellipsis at the end of the message, does that mean he wants me to....
Answer an implied question?
Wait for him to keep writing more information?
That he wants me to justify what he has just said?
It is not a choice as you argue, to interpret meaning behind ambiguous communication, and have effective communication. I cannot ignore implied tone, because I 'don't have 100% certainty of their intention'
Of course, you can.
That first moment of gut feeling is outside the control of your consciousness, but after that, it's a choice.
You can tell yourself, and persuade yourself, that you don't know the why the other person ended a sentence with a period. Because, the fact is, you don't.
Not to mention that an ending period is quite commonly added by dictation software, so it's not even certain that the other person added it by choice.
Furthermore, the myriad of social cues usually emerge in a whole package. You get to see a whole face, or a whole body, with the words, said with human voice. That's significantly more data than the presence of a period.
Is anyone else familiar with this and can shed some light?
| => ,
|| => .
I used to do this in the times when we were separately charged for every text with our cellular service. I'd try to fit as many sentences as possible to each sent message. With the rise of internet based texting, it became unnecessary to use sentence separators, because I could just separate them by sending multiple messages (and not use any punctuation at the end of each sentence, which is the current accepted "friendly" way of communication).
And I’m left wondering if they just typed an extra period or whether they’re trailing off...
I ultimately come to this conclusion. A period is a tiny piece of a message. If something so small makes your message seem in some way negative, then your communication is already on the margin. You should look at other areas of your communication to improve.
My default view of messages in what seems quickly to be becoming the common text style (all lower-case with abbreviations and no punctuation, written in fits of stream-of-consciousness) expresses laziness and a sense of self-importance on the part of the author. I find that assuming good intentions of the author is a much better stance to take. Thus, I choose to interpret positively what might otherwise seem negative to me. If someone else is incapable of looking past a period, then my communication must be very poor indeed, and I must make efforts to improve it.
You're taking it all the way to an extreme where kids these days must be getting upset over periods in messages and wincing with tender emotions (which was a very popular takeaway when the study hit HN).
But here's an actual quote:
> University researchers examined how including or omitting a period in a one-word text response to an invitation — like “yeah,” “maybe” or “nope” — affected people’s understanding. “We found that if you put a period after those short, one-word responses, the people reading the texts … understand (it) as being more negative, less enthusiastic, than if they had no period,” co-author Celia Klin told Moneyish. “We’ve agreed that putting a period after a one-word response in a text conveys something like abruptness, annoyance, negativity.”
Sounds pretty reasonable to me for SMS/WhatsApp texting, and definitely something I agree with since ending a one-word statement with a period when you otherwise never use periods is clearly a statement no matter how small.
And of course, in typical fashion, word of mouth and the Chinese whispers game have bastardized that into what the above HNer claimed: "As far as punctuation, ending periods actually have negative emotion in text vernacular now for younger audiences and should almost never be used in 1-1 messaging."
And you get back to the real core of my point (though I could probably have been clearer).
> Sounds pretty reasonable to me for SMS/WhatsApp texting, and definitely something I agree with since ending a one-word statement with a period when you otherwise never use periods is clearly a statement no matter how small.
I punctuate fastidiously. In my un-blinded, anecdotal data, my interlocutors do not interpret my punctuation negatively. Sometimes they say my vocabulary makes it seem like I'm too big for my britches ... and that I use archaic idioms.
For me, this started in the early 2000s with SMS, and really only applies to chat-style messages, which is why I have no problem using periods here.
You assume someone doesn't understand something, because they hold an opinion different than yours. And you judge moral character for making a joke online. And elsewhere in this thread, you are attempting to police my behavior and tell me when it is okay for me to speak.[0] Despite this, you clearly feel yourself to have the moral high ground over me.
Regardless of what you might think or believe, I evaluate my prior replies in light of every response, even yours. Will you evaluate your officious tone and domineering attitude?
[0] Specifically, not now, after you have determined I do not understand. How am I to learn if a demonstration of ignorance (or at least that indicates such to you) is a prompt to stop talking?
I've never come across the period-as-negative idea before. From the discussion here, it sounds like in-group signalling. For me, punctuation is an unconsious part of writing, and it would take special effort (or a browser extension) to remove it so as not to be marked as an outsider.
I'm so confused why someone would jump to "I don't do it" to "it must be an in-group signal". What group would this even be?
It does a great job at not only showing how this evolution happened, especially around communicating emotions and things like sarcasm, but also at describing the different cohorts who started using the internet at different times and under different circumstances.
It actually has changed how I write on slack. I'm now for example more deliberate about omitting or including periods, break up what before would have been a long, email-like message into smaller messages.
It also made me aware that ellipses have different meaning for different age groups
I've learned to avoid abbreviations and acronyms whenever possible in writing. If it's fast back-and-forth messaging, that could be fine to save time typing. Otherwise, people are very good at seeing long names as single "symbols."
For example, I don't use "CI" for "confidence interval" in reports. I just write both words every time. No confusion, and I doubt there's a difference in reading speed.
Obviously, there are exceptions when space for text is limited (presentation slides, labels in a chart).
It seems that people read too much into the intent (imagined or real) in a text message rather than just the content.
As an older user, I perceive messages that use text spelling (e.g. u instead of you or prolly instead of probably) as unprofessional, but I don't let that get in the way of the conversation
It is interesting though. Looking back at chat history. If I am not writing multiple sentences, and even sometimes when I am, I tend to leave off the last period.
I think emoji reactions to messages, especially in off topic channels, are totally reasonable. And certain ones (+1, -1, 100, etc.) are OK for technical discussions. But don't feel people should be adding faces into the actual content of on topic work messages. But, the actual context in those conversations should be clear, and make them unnecessary.
One thing that actually drives me nuts is when people will keep their messages short. Write 5-10 words of a thought out, hit enter, and keep on going. You end up getting 7 notifications in quick succession, and none of it is complete. Please, just write out your entire though out as one singular cohesive message.
Emojis are good because words can be interpreted with a tone that was unintended, and can lead to all sorts of communication problems. It's small and simple, but an appropriate emoji helps convey our emotions in a way that is more difficult to in short, text based messages.
I agree about rapid short messages, I hate receiving 8 notifications about 1 short paragraph of text.
To me, it also feels less professional, but this thread has opened my eyes to this bias I have. So I am going to attempt to make less of a judgement on this moving forward.
Sure, you can add context in other ways, but it's quick, easy, and effective. Is it unprofessional? Perhaps in an email, but I don't consider every slack message something that should be "professional" in tone. You don't speak professionally to every person IRL (or, at least I hope you don't).
(I'm using their Slack codes here, since I'm not sure I can just embed them directly in an HN comment...)
I tend to come across in text as very detail-oriented and precise, so some careful emoji usage helps recover some of the consideration that would normally be carried by tone or body language.
An example is responding back to a message with "Ok.". I see many over, say, 50 do this much more often, but to many under, say 30, this is taken as very passive aggressive.
Definitely have experienced this.
> shear
sheer
> What one things is clear communication with no ambiguity, another might disagree.
thinks
> todays
today's
> age combined with the lines being blurred between work and home makes
age, combined with the lines being blurred between work and home, makes
> I think with just the... ...makes communication rapidly evolve
I think just the... ...makes communication rapidly evolve
> over, say, 50 do / under, say 30, this
over, say, 50 do / under, say, 30 this
> passive aggressive
passive-aggressive
Well, you weren't lying...
It is especially poor form on HN, because you cannot know whether English is their second language, or whether there are other reasons for mistakes (such as being in a hurry, having dyslexia, or having a disability.)
All the punctuation is less important and I wouldn’t really bother with it.
If you are not a native speaker, corrections are one way to learn from your mistakes and improve your English.
If you are in a hurry then maybe you should wait until you are not in a hurry before posting to HN.
I do agree that correcting someone often comes across in a bad way, but at the same time so does leaving a comment riddled with mistakes.
If the only thing you got from my whole post is my missed period, especially if my post was a response/argument to whatever you claimed, you're either a moron or intentionally trying to one-up me in an aspect that nobody cares about
Grammar is not a signal of intelligence in short-form communications. In long-form/formal communications, it's a minimum barrier to entry (if you can't even be assed to type your name properly, why should I bother with your 50 page paper?), but different context, different systems, different rules
There has to be line somewhere though...
A flawless sentence!
"What one things is clear communication with no ambiguity, another might disagree."
> It is especially poor form on HN
I totally get that I was being annoying. At same time, if there's anywhere one can indulge in the art of being overly pedantic, is it not here?
> having dyslexia, or having a disability
In that case, I would feel bad for jokingly correcting them. Yes, it is hard to know the person behind the keyboard.
> I see many over, say, 50 do this much more often
Here is your 'corrected' version:
> I see many over, say, 50 yo this much more often
Any-way, i was indiccating the nead for conssisstency, not absulute corectness,,,
I can see how some might take a single "Ok." that way, but it probably really does depend a lot on context and the nature of the relationship. I tend to acknowledge most people's comments in a very mater-of-fact manner, but I feel adding a simple "thank you" (as in "Ok, thank you.") helps to dispel the raw bluntness of a plain "Ok."
"Please", "sorry", and "thank you"--these magic words can work wonders.
In Slack I find that I can use emoji in lieu of some of the positivity, if that makes sense.
If I have any takeaway from this conversation it is that I should use _more_ emoji simply because a lot of emotional context is being lost through the internet. I feel like this is especially important because I manage people and my tone can really matter.
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) ; )
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.
Zulip, by any chance?
oh that's easy
you just write one short sentence at a time
like this :-)
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.
[1]: https://www.earwolf.com/episode/how-the-internet-is-transfor...
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.
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.
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.
The book he mentions, Because Internet, goes into more detail. But to over-simplify, there were a few major generations of people joining the internet as well as a generation that never fully joined, and each one developed its own conventions for casual writing on their own. Some used the same mechanism to mean different things.
This sort of typing really drives me up the wall, too. I submitted a feature request to Slack about a year ago asking that implement some sort of throttle on notifications (they acknowledged my request, but took no action on it).
Basically, for example, I would want to set a throttle to be notified every minute of all messages that were received in the past 60 seconds. So if 4 messages were received in that timeframe, I would only be pinged once instead of 4 times.
Not in the content. But after the content of the whole message to indicate tone? I do that pretty much all the time, as there are generally multiple ways a message can be interpreted.
We can’t do facial expressions on chat, and we don’t have the length of content that comes with email (at least, I’d rather use one emoji than 50 extra words).
I disagree about receiving multiple messages in a row. To me, composing longer messages (especially with multiple paragraphs) feels much more formal; it’s like writing an email or a letter rather than having a conversation. I do sometimes write like that, but only on the rare occasion that I need to be particularly formal.
I don't like having a conversation over text. It feels inefficient, and I have to be on my phone more than I want to.
I prefer the "couple of paragraphs" format of HN, where you think through your message, and maybe edit a bit, before you send.
I'm also 30 ;-)
Social conversations are fluid and open-ended, with participants organically shifting between listening and speaking. A period however conveys finality, which is off-putting in such a human setting.
For example, “No.” sounds like the very stern “No” of someone who’s not willing to listen or discuss any further.
There are plenty of uses of emoji that don’t add clarity, but I think it’s a bit much to say they can’t be used in a way that adds clarity at all.
It is literal shorthand for a well-defined word whose definition can be found. It is visually distinct, and follows the centuries of typographical design we use to acquire written symbols. And it refers to a well-known concept.
So I have no objection to it.
Of course there are some symbols which are easier to visually acquire, and seem to refer to well-defined concepts. But even the various smileys are unintelligible as to their meaning when taken as a group.
So once one gets off the basic "smiling face/thumbs up/thumbs down" subset I'd say it is a disaster for communication in a professional setting, and is exclusionary in a way that its proponents actually want it to be - as an in-group indicator that makes them feel a part of something that "others" are not.
A laughing emoji would let us know that you think it's funny that people are this inarticulate, although it'd be a touch condescending.
An eye-roll emoji would indicate a frustration with the problem, suggesting that it personally affects you in some way — perhaps your relatives are using too many emojis and it irritates you personally.
A frown emoji, meanwhile, would suggest a more sincere concern for the state of written communication in our culture, and would imply that you think something important is being lost.
Explaining the meaning of those three unicode characters in context took an additional 480 characters. Can you see why people use them? They're very efficient.
- There are over 3,000 emojis defined in unicode, which is a very large vocabulary in which to become expert.
- There is no well-defined meaning for any of the emojis, even the "simple" common ones. One must try to infer from shared context what the sender means. This is fraught with error opportunities.
- They mean different things to different subgroups, and act as an "in-group" credential in many cases.
- They are visually very indistinct, and can be difficult to distinguish one from another for people who have less than perfect vision, or color-blindness.
- For people with autism or other non-neurotypical processing they can be completely unintelligible, rendering the communication even less successful than "traditional" language.
In short, emojis are undefined, colloquial, designed for only a small portion of the population, and have constantly shifting interpretations of a vast dictionary of symbols.
I don't know why that's a good idea for improving the clarity of communication.
Most of those emoji aren't commonly used. There's a falafel emoji; no one's going around adding a falafel to the end of their messages trying to impart some hidden meaning.
> There is no well-defined meaning for any of the emojis, even the "simple" common ones.
There's also no well-defined meaning to a shrug or an eye-roll, but it's still a useful way of communicating emotion. Semantically, an emoji isn't used like a word. It's used like a gesture or facial expression. In practice, the message is usually quite clear — clearer, in fact, than if an emoji hadn't been used, since in the absence of tone-of-voice and body language text can itself create ambiguity.
> They mean different things to different subgroups, and act as an "in-group" credential in many cases.
Do you have an example of an emoji meaning different things to different groups? In my experience they have a pretty consistent meaning across our culture — even the more abstract ones, like an upside-down smile. The only barrier is "whether or not you're familiar with the typical meaning," and that's the case for any expression or colloquialism. If I say "they're like two peas in a pod" and you have no idea what that means, that doesn't mean it's an in-group signifier. Granted, familiarity with emojis correlates with age, but that's the same with any linguistic shift.
> They are visually very indistinct, and can be difficult to distinguish one from another for people who have less than perfect vision, or color-blindness.
I'm sure there are accessibility options which people can configure on their phones to minimize this. Large-text mode, for instance, or a high-contrast emoji font. Text itself is a medium which isn't very accessible to vision-impaired people, and we have developed solutions for that.
> For people with autism or other non-neurotypical processing they can be completely unintelligible, rendering the communication even less successful than "traditional" language.
Autistic people also have trouble understanding the meaning of facial expressions and of metaphors sometimes, but that doesn't mean that those shouldn't be used in conversation. It just means that everyone should know their audience.
---
I don't think you've raised any serious practical issues — they seem to be all special cases, such as "what if you're talking to an autistic person or a blind person or an older person." Under those circumstances I would communicate differently, same as if I were speaking to a deaf person, or emailing a blind person, or talking to someone with poor English skills. There is no universally-viable way of communicating, but emoji typically reduce ambiguity and add layers of expression to a message, so in most cases they're a good choice.
I like to think you've done it on purpose.
That is extremely problematic, since I've already lost track of how many misparses (and resulting conflict over misunderstanding the meaning) have happened because of someone who wrote what should be multiple .-separated sentences as a single long and unpunctuated stream of text.
A memorable example: There is a huge difference between
I didn't know that. He did it.
I didn't know that he did it.> sure
and
> sure.
will be interpreted slightly differently from each other.
I'm 28 for reference, and I get VERY different vibes from those younger than me who join slack, and those older (40+ or so). The difference in meaning for different punctuation for these crowds is SO evident, I feel like I'm always playing translator for even the language I grew up speaking and writing.
The biggest example of this is the ellipsis among the older crowd. In informal messaging that I grew accustomed to it went from being overused, to nowadays seeming like you are being sarcastic or angry about something. So among the younger crowd I see it almost never used anymore. On the other hand the older generations picked it up from how we used to use it, as a sort of pause. But they co-opted it as probably the most common punctuation used in their messaging. I'm not joking when I will sometimes receive a message from an older coworker that will contain an ellipsis every 5 words or so.
It's always been interesting deciphering the actual meaning of some messages based on solely age of the sender.
This all to say, deciphering punctuation at all in informal writing is an interesting game.
So in order to avoid throwing your anecdata altogether, how many people of each age group did you communicate with using text form?
It could also be a case of when I do see it used regardless of age, it appears to either be overused, or rarely used, and overuse tends to lean older.
I've had a few profs that would the ellipsis for every single sentence, and my brain subconsciously treated his emails as mysterious. It's not too bad once you get used to it.
There's also the weird thing of younger people like myself avoiding proper punctuation/capitalization for the aesthetic. Mainly because a lack of proper writing can make certain messages feel more "relaxed" and casual, if that makes sense.
I don't think it's weird at all, and I don't think it's simply aesthetic. All these things (punctuation, capitalization, emoji/emoticons, representations of non-verbal communication like "lol" and "hmm", message boundaries, message send times) are ways of conveying tone, nuance, and a personal voice in an otherwise sterile, flat medium.
These nuances have been around as long as we've had instant messaging, but the specifics have changed over time. Representations of laughter are a good example: over the years we've had (in no order) "lol", "Lol", "LOL", "rofl", "ROFL", "lmao", "lmfao", "LMAO", "LMFAO", "hah", "haha", "hahaha", "HAHAHAHA", "roflmao", "roflcopter", and others. Over time the nuances of these options have changed, with some no longer au courant (the rofl family is currently outmoded), just as spoken slang and language rapidly evolve. Punctuation choices and so on follow similar patterns.
I do roll my eyes a little bit at some of the wild prescriptivism that can be found in this thread, which I think completely misses the point. The footnote from the original post I find especially infuriating:
>sloppy with their written communication, which is to say "careless and unsystematic; excessively casual".
Casual speech is not sloppy! Choices of punctuation, capitalization, and so on are deliberate.
the people gatekeeping language are the same people that don't understand why age discrimination happens
`,,,` have been a funny, casual alternative I've seen from and accidently seemed to have picked up from younger folk.
A tough side-effect of this I've seen though is the possibility of excluding some non-native English speakers, both in terms of making it harder for them to consume content because of it using a wider vocabulary, and making it harder for them to succeed (in things like interviews) because of higher communications standards.
I don't know where I fall on this, because it does allow for better communication, it just requires more from participants. In fact poor communicators would be excluded regardless of their native language.
The more often people write informally, the more difficult it is for non-native speakers to learn correct grammar. I almost always use full sentences and correct punctuation in all forms of communication. But I make sure to always write correctly when I'm communicating with non-native speakers. I am doing them a disservice, otherwise. And it's also frustrating to me when I'm learning a language and what I'm reading from native speakers is below even my capability.
Also, I think there's a difference between making mistakes in a foreign language, and being lazy or not caring. For example, capitalizing the first letter of a sentence or the word "I" is something that 99% of people know they should do. So that mistake is not usually due to lack of fluency in a language.
Acronyms are nice when you've got a long, frequently used phrase, as long as everyone in the conversation knows what they mean. I think banning acronyms entirely would be eliminating all of the useful value from the practice of using acronyms, while not necessarily addressing the largest problem that the use of acronyms causes.
you can be perfectly clear in lowercase and with sparse punctuation
acronyms can be ambiguous, but to say then that we should all write formally is a huge leap
frankly anyone who can't write clearly like this is a poor writer
i also doubt it really excludes non-native speakers unless you're using a lot of slang/abbreviations
The main one that trips me up is when people use acronyms I'm not familiar with. Then I try to Google for them, but sometimes it's hard to find, or ambiguous.
Which makes me wonder if the author of the article used the noun "ask" deliberately, and whether it simply means "question".
Using that word out of carelessness in an article about the clarity of communication, with a mention of non-native speakers would be ironic.
I couldn't imagine writing without at least attempting to use proper grammar. Especially in German where ignoring capitalization makes a difference of night and day.
My reasoning has been similar to the one of the author, but more on a "positivity" than a plain productivity level. If it's easy for others to read my messages and not having to puzzle over them, I hope that it will leave them with overall a more positive association of writing/communicating with me. And that not only goes for professional texting, but writing with friends (or dating) as well. I know it won't always come out perfect, but overall I think it shows some level of respect towards the other person.
Periods + capitalization (when writing in English) over IM comes across as "cold" to me, whether or not someone's using emoji; unless they're above a certain age, of course.
At one time most written language didn't put spaces between words (some still do), and many languages don't write vowels. That's not a good reason for doing the same in your informal English Slack messages.
You can write an informal message and still use punctuation.
i havent used any but ive been perfectly clear
People will also be confused if you shout out a message to the room without appropriate pauses (commas or periods) or without the right tone (question marks).
In the same way, face to face communication doesn’t suddenly abandon inflection or tone simply because it is real-time.
In both instances they disturb the train of thought which is why I am not a huge fan of open plan offices, nor instant messaging during coding and concentrating. It’s why libraries don’t have buzzers and bells going off.
Following your metaphor: if I were in a room with a couple hundred other people I _probably would_ say "excuse me" before shouting a question.
There are some people who basically braindump many lines of text with no punctuation but they are not the most common and it's a signal that the person does not respect the room- so they are somewhat scorned even if not directly.
Hi Corporate Counsel,
As discussed, I am now doing the thing, description description. Thanks.
Otherwise email was just a way to write something down that you didn't want read or acted upon.
Corporate communication varies quite a bit, of course.
In my case, all lowercase and lack of punctuation don't bother me or slow me down. (I'll agree on uncommon acronyms hindering understanding.)
To reduce some frustrations... listen to linguist McWhorter explaining that people should think of texting (or Slack) as "transcribed informal speech" -- instead of formal writing.[1]
That said, the author Mitch Lee's bio says he's a cofounder of Penny. If you are employed by him and are communicating at his company via Slack, it's better for your career if you follow his guidelines.
I can't watch the video right now, but even in informal speech, I hear periods and commas. I think that those are necessary for communication. Not including them, as I mention in another comment above (or below?), induces a cognitive load on the reader. Nobody should be asking for perfection on Slack, but mostly correct should be the bar.
you hear pauses, which can be communicated in more than one way
as shown here
...was this unduly hard to understand?
For example: You must always be mindful of privacy laws when handling personal health information (PHI). Remember, that you may only access PHI when necessary to do your job, and never to fulfill personal curiosity about a patient.
Unfortunately, this doesn't work for a chat room because it's not meant to be read from beginning to end. My personal rule is to never use acronyms, unless I can follow the above rule.
I've worked in many different industries, and learning acronyms has been a consistent and pointless barrier to achieving productivity. I don't want to put that onto anyone else. Even worse, you run the risk of your reader ignoring the lesson entirely, simply because they don't know what the acronym means.
In and of itself, "PHI" does not seem any more important than any other acronym. On the other hand, "personal health information," has an obvious connotation of importance.
Very interesting book and worth reading to understand how to tailor communication for the medium.
I've had people get actually angry with me for doing it.
My personal nitpick is people writing a stream of one-sentence messages without punctuation instead of a longer structured message - that definitely carries the connotation of unstructured thinking to me - but it doesn't have much to do with full stops per se.
Mostly because most chat messages are single sentences.
So I guess that people leave them out when they aren't part of a full paragraph of text.
Confused.
I'll also add I'm not the arbiter of what is and isn't correct or wrong, just explaining my own opinion.
But that's kind of ancillary to the point of this post, no? The main point it's trying to drive home is be as informative as possible. Don't assume your audience knows your tone, your conventions, your abbreviations.
I suspect this is largely for those who have newly entered the work force, who may only know texting style communication (with friends, shared corpus of knowledge), and formal business communication, and this is to warn them that Slack, while less formal than the latter, doesn't imply the shared context that the former would often have.
Hey.
Statement: We got the tickets for tonight!
Response: Yay.
This is probably because:
- IMs are already formatted to show the end of each message (chat bubble, etc), so a period communicates extra 'finality' beyond what is necessary;
- Sentence fragments are normal and expected, but seem weird with a period at the end;
- Using formality in an informal setting can create a sense of emotional distance;
- IM cues like these are likely established and spread by people who have mostly used IM in non-professional settings, with friends and significant others, and those norms are then brought with them when interpreting the IMs they receive in a professional setting. If you never communicated with your significant other via text message, you've probably never needed to express as many subtle emotional signals into your texts, and so just treat them like emails. But if you have, then you eventually pick up how powerful punctuation can be at communicating emotion in that medium.
Eg.
> I'll be home late tonight
>> Okay
VS:
> I'll be home late tonight
>> Okay.
> I'll be home late tonight
>> Okay.
> I'll be home late tonight.
>> Okay.
I don't think anybody would bat an eyelash at either part of this exchange, because they "match" in style.
Because while I totally agree with the individual that you are replying too, I TOTALLY see how it could seem ridiculous to someone with the periods-end-sentences perspective.
Let me try and come up with an ideal example. Consider this IM to a friendly teammate concerning an important (but not critical) meeting:
> did we get everything sorted out for the meeting this afternoon? we cant screw it up again
> Did we get everything sorted out for the meeting this afternoon? We can't screw it up again
> Did we get everything sorted out for the meeting this afternoon? We can't screw it up again.
In my world, the first two communicate pretty much the same thing. In the first example, you could probably even replace the question mark with a comma. I would likely send the second message, as I prefer descriptive, detail-adding punctuation. I would be less likely to send the third message to a young coworker because it seems standoffish.
Having said all that, any of the three messages would suffice. Someone mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but we - or at least the younger generation - have all become quite good at code switching. Crazy times
If I want to explicitly leave a thought open for continuation, especially in chat style communication, I place three periods at the end of a sentence. I consider that an invitation to the reader's mind to conclude the sentence. So it's either one period or three of them for me, but none at all just feels wrong.
For example, I would read "Sounds good" in a generally positive way just like when someone is saying that in person, but when I read "Sounds good." I read it without any emotion in my head which sounds wierd.
Like project managers think they're channelling Bezos with "?" messages. I can see how some people interpret "stupid" as "powerful," when that's their experience of authority and then they just imitate it, but it's worth being aware that it breeds contempt.
Heh, my Slack messages are way more casual than Tinder messages. I think the essential difference is I just met someone who I'm talking to on Tinder (hopefully :D), while on Slack I'm probably talking to someone I've known for years; it's fundamentally more casual.
?
With care, short messages can be very effective.
"?" and "!" are great for a quick/informal communication of curiosity or interest.
If my partner gets an unexpected bill in her inbox and sends over a friendly "?", it doesn't carry anywhere near the meaning that Bezos intends. If I got one, it'd mean something like, "Hey, this is odd. Do you know where it came from?" It is all about broader context.
Also, if people feel like casual or "sloppy" communication will be judged negatively, they might often choose to say nothing at all instead of sharing half-baked ideas, which probably reduces organic creativity and innovation, even if it leads to fewer interruptions.
So while I get the point this post is making, there are costs on both sides here. And some of the worst downsides of the casual style (interruptions, in particular) can be minimized by adding more structure around sync vs. async communication, protected focus time, and using different mediums when appropriate.
People should go for the middle ground on Slack. If you miss a period, so what? But skipping all of them just to be "casual"? That induces a cognitive load on your reader that you shouldn't.
I started a new job ~2 months ago and things that everyone thinks everyone understands I simply did not. These weren't documented acronyms but rather "socially understood" acronyms that meant each time I didn't understand something I had to message someone asking.
While onboarding the amount of times I message people asking for help is so much that it gets uncomfortable (for me, at least) so minimizing the acronyms would be super helpful.
As a counter-point, though, it could be that each culture/tribe needs their own language that only they can understand and it creates this feeling of comradery? Just a thought.
I personally start to struggle with this after the first year when the grace period to ask "stupid" questions is over.
The time you spend composing a message should be proportional to the number of people in your intended audience.
I disagree with the details of this argument, the costs seem strawman ish. You quickly get used to writing styles, chat systems are an ongoing ecosystem and you adapt quickly.
What I would suggest is to try and make your messages self contained with context. Avoid private messaging and ask things on open channels, too much information is hidden away in private messages. Even if your question is really for a specific person. Seeing conversations helps build narratives and context for teams.
If you can write clearly without using these tools or if you're writing in a situation where style is more important than clarity, fine. Go nuts.
If you just can't be bothered to make, like, five extra keypresses... C'mon, man.
It's also important to consider the range of reactions. For those who understand an acronym, they likely won't even notice; for those who don't understand it, they risk losing face and potentially looking like an idiot when they have to ask what the acronym means. The "time saved" is helpful, sure, but considering how people will respond goes beyond "how much time will they spend asking a follow-up question?" and also includes "how will they feel if they don't understand this?"
* Posting in a highly-visible channel where most/if not all people will lack context. Treat it like an email and make sure it's punctually and grammatically correct. * Posting in a team channel where the attitude is casual. Pump those messages out pretty much like you're talking them.
This doesn't mesh with how I feel toward Slack. Slack itself is the thing that's disrupting my productivity and deterring deeper thinking by pinging me all the time. When I open Slack, the vast majority of the time, I'm looking to express my point as clearly AND concisely as possible so I can get back to doing whatever it was, which is 99% of time more important. As a result I use (or don't use) grammatical conventions, capitalization, and emoji depending on the context of my message and what will allow me to get my entire message across the fastest, and hopefully correctly.
If I'm messaging the person I've pairing with all day, or if I'm coordinating with my team about who will pick up a story, I'm much less likely to give my message all the proper formatting. These people what I'm like and how I tend to communicate, and so I can rely on that prior knowledge to "cut corners" here and there. I'm also much, much more likely to use emoji because I can communicate my intentions and my "intonation" nearly instantly, without having to sit there and worry about wordsmithing my whole message.
That being said, if I'm message in a large public channel that perhaps has multiple teams or belongs to a team I don't normally interact with, I'll spend much more time wordsmithing and editing to make sure I'm following proper conventions - mostly for the sake of clarity.
It does make some very salient points (think about how others could misinterpret your message, expand acronyms/use them sparingly, write to your audience, etc.) but I think they bought a little bit too much into the "Slack has replaced email" argument. For me, the main benefit of Slack over email is the lowered barrier to entry to starting a conversation and the ability to keeping it flowing, and part of achieving that is being okay with lowering the standards of communication.
I totally agree about shorthand. It can be unnecessarily ambiguous. But punctuation isn't related to acronyms, I don't think? As others have pointed out, punctuation over instant-messaging services can add meaning you don't intend. I generally don't capitalize the first letter of sentences or end messages with periods in IM applications.
If they had just named it "A case for avoiding use of shorthand in Slack", I'd 100% agree.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2...
> 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.
It's so bizarre that people perceive some nefarious intent because a sentence ends with a period.
For me, respectful written communication also includes proper punctuation & capitalization — since it makes reading easier.
General chat: Proper punctuation. Keep sentences terse. Reply promptly. Leave no room for ambiguity.
Direct message: Often if a matter takes place outside of a public channel, it is because a duty or responsibility is being delegated to you or a sensitive subject is involved. One should take extra precaution to speak forthrightly to ease the recipient, but also take measures to be prompt and present.
Makes a world of difference.
The most important thing I've learned about online tone is that it's less about what you say and more about how you tell others to speak to you.
I think there are some good points here for technical writing. But it's easy to forget how memorable playful communication can be.
E.g. a responding via haiku or something no-caps and full of enjambment, might be extremely memorable. (especially in a chat full of technical writing style).
It's probably a good idea to tell people this instead of just assuming everyone knows... but it's kind of engrained in the culture of the communities I'm in.
"What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure."
I would rather use E-mail, if only there was a FidoNet-like culture of using it properly among the users and the E-mail client software authors (that would enable proper threading and include quoting only the particular parts you answer).
IMHO the best communication format is a HN-like comments thread.
To which I say: "Duh!? What, you thought people who do it don't realise that's the case? That's exactly why they do it, even!".
The more common context the producer and the consumer share, the less need there is for punctuation, spelling out abbreviations or other niceties.
but this article claimed to provide justification for focusing on grammar and style in communication. i do not see that justification here.
i will continue to not capitalize my slack messages.
I like to think that sometimes, my chat style gives others a little bit of break-think amidst all the rapid-fire.
GTM.
Go To Meeting Google Tag Manager Go to Market Good to Me
It's so frustrating when external requests without context come to me with this.
This doesn't mesh with how I feel toward Slack. Slack itself is the thing that's disrupting my productivity and deterring deeper thinking by pinging me all the time. When I open Slack, the vast majority of the time, I'm looking to express my point as clearly AND concisely as possible so I can get back to doing whatever it was, which is 99% of time more important. As a result I use (or don't use) grammatical conventions, capitalization, and emoji depending on the context of my message and what will allow me to get my entire message across the fastest, and hopefully correctly.
If I'm messaging the person I've pairing with all day, or if I'm coordinating with my team about who will pick up a story, I'm much less likely to give my message all the proper formatting. These people what I'm like and how I tend to communicate, and so I can rely on that prior knowledge to "cut corners" here and there.
I'm also much, much more likely to use emoji because I can communicate my intentions and my "intonation" nearly instantly, without having to sit there and worry about wordsmithing my whole message. Sure, sending "I'm done for the day" and "I'm done for the day <wave emoji>" mean the same thing, my hope is that by including the waving emoji it shows I'm not signing off out of frustration, but instead that I'm just at the end of my hours and it's time to log off. This is a bit of a contrived example, as I don't think hardly anyone would read the first message and think "they're mad", but I hope my argument is still clear.
That being said, if I'm message in a large public channel that perhaps has multiple teams or belongs to a team I don't normally interact with, I'll spend much more time wordsmithing and editing to make sure I'm following proper conventions - mostly for the sake of clarity.
The author does make some very salient points (think about how others could misinterpret your message, expand acronyms/use them sparingly, write to your audience, etc.), and as a whole I think erring on the side of more "professional" and "standardized" is always a safe bet, but I can't help but feel that they bought a little bit too much into the "Slack has replaced email" argument (not really his fault, that is how they like to market it). For me, the main benefit of Slack over email is the lowered barrier to entry to starting a conversation and the ability to keeping it flowing; part of achieving that is being okay with somwhat lowering the standards of communication.
Unrelated: I posted this comment and then tried to correct a typo, and the edit didn't go through. After I hit "Update" the page would just refresh and the text stayed the same. Anyone seen that before?