This week is the first week where we’ll really start to look at some of the content we see when it comes to online language. Specifically, we’re looking at writing conventions – what choices do people make when it comes to punctuation, capitalization, and structure?
Structure
As mentioned in a previous post, one benefit of online writing is that we don’t usually have to worry about the space our writing is taking up. Hence, we can use a linebreak to show a new utterance or a new thought (McCulloch 110-111). In informal contexts, this also allows for users to drop sentence-final punctuation (which will be expanded upon later in this post). The use of linebreaks applies not only to texting, but also to more formal pieces of writing, like newspaper articles. Rather than using line indents, online publishers can include line breaks between paragraphs (111). However, publishers do usually maintain standard punctuation in these situations.
Online contexts also offer some spaces in which users can use traditional writing structures – but often with some adjustments. One 2012 study looked at how Facebook users interacted with one college’s Facebook posts. Many of the comments on these posts tended to use openings and closings, making them more akin to little emails than to straightforward direct messages. Most of these openings were mentions of the addressee rather than more elaborate greetings (Pérez-Sabater 87). Closings tended to be expressions of thanks or the slogan of the college’s athletic department (89). In general, commenters who were native speakers of English tended to use a similar register throughout their comment. Non-native speakers tended to use more formal greetings and closings in their comments, but mixed in more informal stylistics (89). All of this is to say that less formal stylistics are not necessarily viewed as such by all users, but that native speakers (at least in this study) seemed to draw a strong connection between nonstandard stylistics and informality, and vice versa.
Punctuation
Punctuation, or the lack of it, seems to be a recognizable feature in online writing. For instance, because line breaks are so often used in texts/direct messages, there is not necessarily a need for a period at the end of a text message in the same way we need a period in a longer text. So to a young text-savvy person, the presence of an unrequired period might suggest that it is indicating some additional meaning, like a serious or falling tone of voice (McCulloch 113-114). In general, punctuation can be used in nonstandard ways to indicate emotion, intention, or emphasis in a message (Crystal 63).
Ellipses (…) may also create similar confusion to periods. In informal writing offline, writers use them to mark spaces between thoughts or sentence fragments in a space-efficient way (McCulloch 111). A postcard writer, for example, might write “Went to the beach yesterday…took a walk in the afternoon…beautiful area”. But because space efficiency is not as urgent in text messages, ellipses are generally not used this way. Rather, many users have claimed them as a way to indicate a trailing off tone. This can lead to confusion if two users who use ellipses differently interact. What reads to one person as a perfectly normal message (perhaps, “Saw Alex this morning…it was her birthday this weekend”) in which the ellipses are marking a separation between two clauses might read to another person as indicating a tone of voice. This tone of voice may in turn appear to a user as confusion or passive aggression (something like, “Alex’s birthday was this weekend, why didn’t you send her a card?”) (112-113). However, ellipses may be retaining their original function in at least one online space: blogs (Crystal 69). In these contexts, where communication is mostly one-sided and asynchronous, ellipses can be used to punctuate streams of thought, as they might in diaries or journals.
The exclamation mark has kept its old meaning of excitement or emphasis, but also seems to be used online to indicate warmth and sincerity (McCulloch 123-124). This extension likely came from the linking of excitement to sincerity; “After all,” McCulloch says, “to be excited to meet someone or help someone is also to be sincere about it”. One 2006 study found that exclamation marks in a sample of emails were used to express excitement in 9.5% of the sample, expressed emphasis in 29.5% if the sample, and expressed friendliness in 32% of the sample. Why has this new usage become popular? Well, in a context where you don’t have extralinguistic markers of emotions from your conversation partner, it can be helpful to have an explicit mark of sincerity or genuine excitement.
Asterisks (*) and underscores (_) have been used to emphasize text (Crystal 64). This usage originated with software that allowed users to use asterisks and underscores to code their text as bold or italicized (McCulloch 127). This is not something universally available across all software. But these symbols are easy to notice visually and are easily accessible on a computer or phone keyboard, so they continue to be used to emphasize text even if the text is not being visually bolded or italicized.
The tilde (~) has gained the ability to mark sarcasm in some online contexts (137). This mark, having very few functions in everyday written English, was first used as simple decoration in digital writing or to indicate drawn out words (138). This second function evolved from how Japanese internet users used the tilde to indicate a drawn out utterance. Since Japanese is written with a syllabary (one symbol for every syllable), they could not simply repeat the final symbol of a word to indicate a drawn out utterance; instead, they used the tilde (131). This usage was adopted by some English speakers, so the tilde now was established as a marker of how words sounded. The first use, for writing decoration, often indicated enthusiasm (why else would you spend time decorating your writing?). Taken together, both of these uses indicated a non-serious utterance. Over time, users seemed to narrow the meaning from simply non-serious to sarcastic (138). It is also possible that the tilde was adopted because its shape could be interpreted as reflecting a sarcastic tone which oscillates in pitch – but this may be a fun fancy more than a proposal with actual evidence (138).
The hashtag, originally known as the pound sign (#), also had precious few uses in standard written English. Now, its most often used now as a way to self-categorize posts with other posts discussing the same topic (“So impressed with the renovations at the #NeilsonLibrary”). But it could also be used in a more tongue-in-cheek manner to emphasize certain words (“I am #exhausted of the midterm coverage”) or to provide metacommentary (“I’m sure this will all blow over soon #sarcasm”) (130).
Metacommentary can also be provided via carrots (<>) and slashes (/) (127). These marks are, again, not commonly seen in standard written English, but are readily available to keyboard users. They provide a nifty way to designate notes or commentary as being apart from the text in a way parenthesis or brackets do not (since we’re used to them providing asides to the main text, not metacommentary!). The use of these marks also likely grew out of the earlier days of computers and the internet, where coding was much more frequently used by users. If something like <text color: blue> hi everyone! </text color> could be used to affect the appearance of text without changing its content, then <sarcasm> I’m so excited to be here </sarcasm> could do the same – only now the user would be signaling this information to other users, and not to the software. The slash, used in examples like /rant, also acted in a similar manner. Speaking anecdotally, I haven’t noticed the use of < > as much in my time online. It may be that these have become less common as the average user has had to deal with coding less often. The function that these serve, however, still seems to be needed. I have noticed that some communities on Instagram and TikTok have grown fond of using “tone indicators” with the / in order to more explicitly clarify the intention behind any given message. Maybe it just comes down to the fact that typing a slash requires a lot less effort than creating a pseudo-coding bracket using < >.
Capitalization
Capitalization has had a long history of being used to indicate “yelling”, whether it be happy and excited or angry (Crystal 63, McCulloch 115). This goes back at least to 1984 in regards to the internet, and there are pre-internet examples of this in print as well (116). But use of only capital letters was actually normal for regular communication in the early days of the internet, so why did its meaning change and why did it seemingly become so well-known outside of an online context (117)? Capitalization was (and in some contexts, still is) the only way to play with text when writing online. Italics, bold, underline, and choices of color and font are available in word processors, but not when you’re writing a Facebook post or texting your friend (Heath 69). Capitalization is also something that doesn’t usually carry a ton of meaning in offline writing. It indicates the beginning of sentences and proper nouns, but the majority of sentences are still fully understandable without it. So capitalization would be a perfect thing to use for other functions of online writing.
And capitalization does seem to have a strong influence on how we interpret a message, at least according to one 2021 study. Specifically, it seems to affect not the content of a message, but how we “[produce] the text subvocally” – how we imagine the text to be said (69). Participants tended to rate messages in all caps as being higher pitched and louder, which tends to correlate with how we vocalize strong emotion in face-to-face conversations (74). The author, Maria Heath, suggested that since laboratory environments tend to reduce the effects of any given stimuli on participants, the effects of all caps are likely stronger than they appeared in the results of her study (74). However, she suggests that the visual nature of all caps messages is likely not the reason why we have these associations – ie, we don’t perceive the texts as “louder” because an all caps message has bigger and taller text – but rather that we simply learned these associations over time.
Or, to say it in another way, it’s likely that capitalization first was used to emphasize certain words and only later did it gain prosodic connotations.
Lengthening Words
Lengthening words by repeating letters (“no” versus “nooooo”) allows for users to indicate a drawn-out utterance, often to emphasize a certain word. This phenomenon did occur before the internet was around, although in limited capacity (McCulloch 119-120). Many of these early uses appeared in dialogue as a way to convey how a character was speaking. Lengthened words are used for a similar effect today as a way to show which words would be drawn out if the written conversation were occurring in a spoken context.
There are some unspoken rules about how words are allowed to be lengthened. Generally the repeated letter is either the rightmost letter in a word (“noooo”) or the rightmost letter in a smaller unit of sound (“Boooooring”) (120-121). The only exceptions are with consonant clusters; “both” can be lengthened as “booooth” or “bothhhhh” but never “botttth” (121) . But besides this consonant cluster rule, letters are duplicated regardless of whether they can actually be drawn out in a spoken context. Plosives (like the p in “stopppppp”) or silent consonants (“sameeeee”) cannot actually be held for an extended period of time, but this doesn’t seem to prevent them from being lengthened in a written context (121).
Why Use These Conventions?
On one hand, we could chalk these conventions solely up to the desire to indicate tone in written messages. But these conventions also create an in-group, in a sense; there are those who understand what a tilde means and those that do not (148-149). Using a hashtag for something other than its primary purpose suggests one might be playing off the joke that some people overuse hashtags to the point that they are useless (130). Using these conventions competently may create a shared sense of camaraderie, even if the users in a conversation are strangers.
Citations
Crystal, David. Internet Linguistics : A Student Guide, Taylor & Francis Group, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/smith/detail.action?docID=801579.
Heath, Maria (2021) “NO NEED TO YELL: A Prosodic Analysis of Writing in All Caps,” University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: Vol. 27 : Iss. 1 , Article 10. https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol27/iss1/10.
McCulloch, Gretchen. Because Internet : Understanding the New Rules of Language. Riverhead Books, 2019.
Pérez-Sabater, Carmen. “The Linguistics of Social Networking: A Study of Writing Conventions on Facebook“. Linguistik Online, Vol. 56, Nr. 6, Nov. 2012, doi:10.13092/lo.56.257.