Textual Innuendos

People seem to believe that text is an emotionless medium, and I, frankly, disagree.

If you spend enough time speaking through textual mediums such as email, instant message, or text message, you start to pick up on other people’s typing habits.

Particularly after I spend significant amount of time talking to one person, I find my familiarity with their typing habits allows me to notice when their style or tone changes, and thus quickly and easily pick up on information about their emotions.

With all public-facing and/or indexable communications, like blogging, Twittering, or Tumbling, I always use proper capitalization and punctuation. On Facebook, it depends on whose wall I’m writing, but I can go either way. However, in all personal and work-related email, whether it be for my place of employment or my own projects, this applies as well.

I used to type properly while instant messaging, but have since regressed into being an all lowercase type of gal, while still maintaining perfect punctuation and grammar. I type extremely fast and am usually exceedingly accurate, but I use instant messaging all day every day, so I figure I’ll save myself that many extra keystrokes in casual conversation.

I would say the majority of the people I talk to over instant messaging also subscribe to lowercase, with one notable exception, but even he sometimes has a lowercase kind of day. And I always notice.

Unless I am making a point or being stern, I rarely use a period at the end of a sentence. When I use three dots, I’m still thinking and I’m not quite done with the thought… and if I use two dots, it’s because I’m hesitating or trailing off for other reasons.. and if I use an excessive amount of dots, I’m usually being sarcastic or otherwise calling attention to something…………….

I don’t use other end-of-sentence punctuation, unless I’m using it as an entire stand-alone line. Generally as a way of following up a statement with excitement (!) or prodding somebody with an extra window flash if they’ve taken too long to respond to a question (?).

Additionally, just about everybody knows there is a notable difference between using “haha,” “hehe,” “heh,” “ha,” “hah,” or any of the other variations of expressing amusement. Of course, there is no golden guide to what all of the small, nearly impercetible alterations to style or tone might actually mean, because it’s different from person-to-person.

But I know that there is definitely a rhyme and a reason to what I type and how I type it.

June 17th, 2008

 

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