Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

One way to simplify online communications is to send individual utterances, one thought per transmission. For example, “how’s it going” is sent, followed by “just wondered if you wanted to chat sometime this week,” followed by “maybe tuesday?” (110-11) This makes the sender’s thoughts easy to read and avoids awkward punctuation.

Older users, or people more formally trained in writing, often instead separate their thoughts with ellipses (…) or dashes, but these, to younger users, suggest something unsaid rather than a shift to a new thought, something they’d rather indicate with a line break or a Send command.

Punctuation in ancient times was nearly non-existent; Medieval punctuation was somewhat random; early printing press operators regulated their punctuation, and dictionaries helped standardize those practices.

The tone of voice can be signaled in writing. ALL CAPS is used for emphasis and strong emotion—an entire text in all caps comes across as shouting—but some older users, long accustomed to all caps on telegrams, early computer displays, and printers, simply don’t recognize this. Another form of emphasis is extra letters, as in “yayyyy” and “nooo” (119). When used to indicate strong emotion, exclamation points have risen and fallen in popularity.