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When you're writing small, short sentences, there is something off putting about periods. It's just part of the how text based communication has become.

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.

I always attempt to write, even on Slack or other chat programs, in such a way that no unintended tone comes across. To me it feels like I have failed in communicating if an emoji is necessary to convey a message. I honestly cannot think of anywhere I could use them to make a message clearer. But, I will be asking a few folks if there is an issue with my communication, and if I can be more clear in any way. Including the use of emoji.

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.

I agree, I think the only appropriate time for an emoji is to acknowledge somebodies else's message but you don't have anything you want to say. A thumbs up or a celebrate.

I disagree, I think there's many times where a statement can clearly seem hostile, or jovial, at the same time, and adding some emojis to lean towards jovial will make it a 100% safe message.

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 have a small group of emoji that I turn to for this kind of color. :sweat_smile: for a note of self-aware awkwardness. :thinking: when I'm posing an idea without standing behind it too hard, or when my thoughts are continuing beyond the message I've just sent. A few others are not uncommon, but more situational.

(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.

This type of use is exactly what I was talking about in my original post. It does wonders for positive communication. Even if some don't see the need for it, as the article discusses, you need to consider your full audience!

I think with just the shear amount of messaging that is occurring in todays age combined with the lines being blurred between work and home makes communication rapidly evolve. What one things is clear communication with no ambiguity, another might disagree.

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.

To be fair, I'm over 30 and I'd wonder whether "Ok." was passive aggressive in-person or online.

It’s a tone of voice thing I think.

> 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

> passive-aggressive

Well, you weren't lying...

Irony is in the eye of beholder

Correcting someone’s English is usually seen as a sign of social posturing, because higher education is often related to someone’s self-perception of social status ranking. It takes a extremely skilled approach to do it without causing offence.

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.)

Depends on what you are correcting I think. Correcting shear to sheer was the immediate thing I mentally did when reading the message, because if you don’t, people will keep doing this wrong in more important settings too.

All the punctuation is less important and I wouldn’t really bother with it.

If you are a native English speaker, higher education should not be required for basic writing. There is no requirement to use complicated words, but I'd expect someone to be able to spell correctly (especially on a device with spell checking).

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.

I see the issue as more pretentious than anything else -- I know how to spell correctly, I have fucking spellcheck just like you do, but I don't give enough of a damn to go back through and right click every dumb typo and issue; especially when im typing on a phone or a shitty chat app with random delays

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

> if you can't even be assed to type your name properly, why should I bother with your 50 page paper?

There has to be line somewhere though...

The worst case for fixing someone's typo is when you know their first language isn't English and assume that's where the mistake comes from. 99% of the time I make mistakes due to swipe/predictive input changing something I don't notice. Yet it gets pointed out by someone repeatedly writing "should of" or asking for simple spelling advice.

As an ESL speaker, I appreciate people who make an effort to correct me.

> As an ESL speaker, I appreciate people who make an effort to correct me.

A flawless sentence!

:)

Sorry, it was just too hard to pass up the irony embedded in this 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.

Sorry, the last few corrections didn’t make any sense even after correction.

Muphry's law in action. On the second-to-last, they moved a comma (wrongly), and completely missed the major typo (possibly just autocorrected back to the wrong thing). It should be: "over, say, 50 yo" ("yo" being short for "years old"), and the other half should always have a comma after "30" (the one after "say" is optional depending on where they put pauses when they speak).

Here is the original text:

> 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,,,

> 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.

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.

I mostly just use the 3 or 4 "base" emojis. But, particularly in relatively terse emails/messages, I think it's often useful to indicate that you don't intend to be taken literally/totally seriously/etc. I suppose that you can just avoid making flippant remarks and such but that's not the way most people communicate casually in person.

Just remember that beyond words, our expressions, gestures, and tone, are all important parts of effective human communication, and text lacks all of that. Subtlety in meaning or intent can change while still using the same words. Slack isn't formal writing, it's more casual communication between humans, and emojis just make it all a little less ambiguous. I certainly agree that you should try to be as clear as possible, and that overuse of emojis can be tiresome, but there are definitely situations where a simple emoji or two can make all the difference in how your words are perceived.

Comparing Slack to email, in an email I generally provide a feedback sandwich: start with a positive note or warm introduction, transition into a call to action with explanatory details, and again end on a positive note.

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.

> When you're writing small, short sentences, there is something off putting about periods.

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) ; )

I see it done that way a lot where each small sentence is its own message. Even more annoyingly, they often do it in a main channel on Slack after the message they're responding to, instead of "replying in thread".

Purely anecdotal but I think it’s from irc/aim users (a lot of millennials/genx including myself) since long form communication wasn’t really a thing on there. I see some people write paragraphs as messages on discord servers and iirc that wasn’t technically even possible on irc and I feel like it’s even strange to see in the middle of lighter chatter.

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.

> That #tagging/#threading feature available on the other slack/discord/teams competitor I can’t think of right now is something I really want.

Zulip, by any chance?

Yes! Thank you, I haven’t been lucky enough to try it. Always slack nowadays..

> Also, how do you write (delineate, identify, etc) small, short sentences without periods?

oh that's easy

you just write one short sentence at a time

like this :-)

Worth noting that this carries a lot better in a medium like IRC or Slack, where the message framing implies an "end" in its own right. It looks a little strange in an HN comment, because they all come in the same single message.

Aha - so you're using CR's to denote end of sentences rather than periods, which would be an interesting evolution for the (written) language.

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.

Language actually changes like this a lot, and it's really interesting ... Back a good 70 years ago, ellipses were commonly used for this in informal mediums such as postcards ... It leads to a very different-feeling messages ... Heard it on a podcast about how the internet has changed grammar [1]

[1]: https://www.earwolf.com/episode/how-the-internet-is-transfor...

Please never do this in Slack though. Unless all of your statements carry a different topic, that should be one message.

In my experience this is pretty much a universal norm for all Americans below 30. Putting a period at the end of a sentence may come across as curt or rude.

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.

I know that historically, newspaper headlines were lengthier, and quite likely to be a grammatically valid 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.

If the message is long enough to actually have multiple sentences, each individual sentence has a period. The last sentence simply drops the period.

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.

Tom Scott has a nice intro video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fS4X1JfX6_Q

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.

Hah! Well, I'm so old, I remember having two spaces after every period. And, I, too, hate waking up to 12 notifications, of which 3-4 are usually pings to my team alias, and then seeing a bunch of DM notifications. It makes me feel like I missed something urgent, when, often, it's just people who hate putting periods after the end of their thoughts. Maddening!

To be honest, I have almost all mobile device notifications turned off. Though I realize some people are in groups that have more of an expectation of immediate response.

Exactly.. I was wondering the same. What notifications are these people talking about. First thing I do on my phone is to turn off all notifications.

I don't turn all off. But it's a pretty high bar and those I have notification on for are pretty low volume that I typically do want to respond to or be aware of in a timely manner.

Fun aside, on most mobile platforms, hitting the space key twice will generally enter a period followed by a space.

iOS keyboard does that regardless of where you type.

My attempt at explaining why periods at the end feel uncomfortably stiff in a Slack-like environment:

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.

> 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.

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.

I feel that negative emotion from periods on the last sentence (especially for messages that are only one sentence). So if you’re wondering what age range feels that way, you can consider 30 years old your upper bound :)

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.

> it’s like writing an email or a letter rather than having a conversation.

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 ;-)

> But don't feel people should be adding faces into the actual content of on topic work messages

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).