“How Many Exclamation Points Are Too Many in an Email? A Psychologist Weighs In.” A psychologist! This article appeared in Parade last summer, but you could find the same question being asked, at varying levels of desperation, in any season over the past decade. It is widely understood that exclamation points must be inserted into the modern professional email at precise intervals — just enough to create a tone of eagerness and warmth without tipping over into sounding fake, sycophantic or batty. So people appeal to the internet, terrified they’re hindering their careers by striking the wrong balance; they seek advice from job coaches; they joke about their obsessive budgeting of exclamations. They fear seeming overexcited, yes — but they also know the risks of the plain old period. Too brusque. Too cold. Too testy.
It has been this way since soon after the smartphone arrived, when older Americans started getting the unwelcome news that ending their messages with periods was a grave faux pas. This must have been a baffling experience, like being called gross for drinking water or flossing. But a new tonal consensus really had emerged: The period seemed pointed, stern, passive-aggressive. By 2013, this shift was ingrained enough that The New Republic ran an article celebrating the period’s newfound role as a jerk.
Since then, our anxieties about tone seem to have skipped right over the content of our messages to the characters that end them. There has been a long parade of replacements for the period. The writer of that New Republic piece thought ellipses were nice. (They’re not; younger people find them not only Boomerish but also horror-movie ominous.) For a while, young people preferred the nervous chuckling of a “lol” or “haha.” (“Why Do Millennials Feel Compelled to Write ‘Lol’ After Everything?” asked Huffpost last fall — to which one answered that it was “like a tension-breaking mechanism,” while another pointed out that texting “I think I love you, lol” allows you to pretend you were kidding if you don’t get a favorable response.) Emoji, too, had their turn as sentence-enders — all except that subset, like the thumbs-up and the “OK” hand signal, that came to be associated with the same passive-aggressive terseness as the period, the equivalent of a clipped verbal “fine.”
Some of these habits are still considered informal or even immature, but they have also aged their way up into typical workplace communication, and some people would love to impose a new consensus around them, too. “It’s impossible to convey emotions through text, and this helps the reader understand your intent,” someone posted on Reddit years ago, regarding lols and hahas. “I have coworkers who sound dead inside when we IM, because they believe any kind of informal slang is reserved for childish teens.”
More and more of what we communicate is aimed to somebody we don’t know or rarely speak to.
Overuse has taken the shine off some tactics, with young men in particular getting mocked for reflexively haha-ing in an effort to seem coolly unbothered. (“Men are always communicating like this via text-based platforms haha,” Kelly Conaboy once wrote on the website The Hairpin. “Why? haha. You don’t have to haha.”) In the workplace, though, more upscale methods of period avoidance have thrived. Consider, for instance, the application of question marks to non-questions we’re hoping to advance gently — the same wheedling uptalk used when we fake-wince and tell a colleague “I don’t know if that will work?” As speech, this habit is so associated with corporate management that it’s mocked in comedies like “Office Space” and early stories by George Saunders, who once had a police officer explain an apparent grave-robbing with the line “Typically it’s teens?” And yet in text it has irresistible utility.
To monitor one’s tone is human, but why are we this scared of sounding brusque in routine emails? The usual explanations revolve around the difficulties of conveying tone in writing. It’s a bit much to say that it’s “impossible to convey emotions through text” — I mean, literature exists — but the lack of access to vocal inflections, facial expressions and listener feedback does create challenges.
If the issue were just writing, though, you’d expect the rise of short-form video to solve it. Making a TikTok or YouTube video restores all of the inflection and expression people claim to be lost without. And yet the people on these platforms are not exactly bringing back deadpan or disdain. For the most part, they evince a manic desire to be ingratiating, with everything from lulling hand movements to singsong speech designed to be immediately liked.
The issue, in other words, isn’t the writing. It’s the lack of context — the fact that more and more of what we communicate is aimed at somebody we don’t know or rarely speak to, with little base line of what we’re normally like. This is true of social media audiences, but it may be equally true of a colleague from accounts payable — someone with whom we might, in another time, have been forced to negotiate some in-person rapport, but now interact with largely via bursts of typing. No amount of tone-marking seems likely to resolve our worries over this arrangement. Even the habits we make socially mandatory will just become invisible obligations that have to be augmented with even friendlier signals. And if this level of social anxiety has infiltrated the act of typing a message, you might as well embrace the full experience: Walk over to accounts payable and say it directly, in whatever expressionless monotone you like. If nothing else, you won’t have to wonder how your new friend reacted.
The post Why Are We Still So Afraid of Using the Grumpy Old Period? appeared first on New York Times.
