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Comment by iamatworknow | Hacker News Reader

I've spent my whole life using punctuation and full sentences when typing. Does it make me seem cold? Maybe, but it'd take more conscious effort for me to change it at this point, which sorta defeats the purpose of some commenters here claiming that it would increase communication speed, at least for me. As far as reading what others write, I really don't care, and find it sort of bizarre that anyone would.

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I think coldness/warmth of the messaging style is much more dependent on emoji use, at least in Slack.

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.

I use emojis very sparingly, but I almost always include some sort of positive comment if I've had a long exchange or back and forth with someone, like an "Oh wow, thanks for bringing this to my attention" or an "I also had trouble with this at first" or a "If you need anything else let me know". I try to keep things conversational but still type well, because that's just what I've always done, in work and socially.

Actually something I've been wondering, as somebody learning German right now: are there equivalents to this kind of slang in online German? Would you _ever_ leave a noun, for example, uncapitalized, for a more casual feel?

I wouldn't, and among my friends it's rather rare, but yeah there are people that don't capitalize when texting casually (or in any form of written text like my mom, which drives me insane).

As an English-speaker, communicating with people who neglect capitalisation in messages frustrates me immensely, especially proper nouns.

I've been on the internet 16 hours a day from a young age, and I've never used smilies/emojis/emoticons, except very ironically in some rare cases. I don't think they're necessary, and I find use of "informal IM style" (eliding capitalization and final periods) to be much more telling of tone, personally, especially among young people.

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.

> As far as reading what others write, I really don't care, and find it sort of bizarre that anyone would.

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.

Acronyms are similar to slang/jargon in that they are understandable only to a specific audience, and may have a confusing meaning for someone unfamiliar.

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.

Acronyms and other jargon are the exceptions, absolutely. But half the time when I see these used it seems more like "intelligence signaling" than an actual means of making communication more efficient. Domain specific jargon might be unavoidable and should be elaborated on, especially for new people, but the business newspeak that gets thrown around a lot is almost always unnecessary, in my opinion.

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