*By Bridgette Webb*
Exclamation points may not have the effect you intend!
Years of overuse have stripped the punctuation mark of its meaning, turning it into an emotional catchall that could suggest anything from actual excitement and friendliness to reassurance and anger.
The ambiguity is stressing many out, and has major implications for coherent communication in the digital age, according to Katie Bindley, a reporter for the The Wall Street Journal.
"We are having conversations now that would otherwise be spoken taking place on text or email," said Bindley in an interview Tuesday on Cheddar. "With that you lose the ability to read facial expressions and tone of voice, so people are overcompensating for that."
And it's not only exclamation marks that are open to debate.
A 2016 [study](9https://www.binghamton.edu/news/story/873/study-punctuation-in-text-messages-helps-replace-cues-found-in-face-to-face) of 126 undergraduates by Binghamton University found that ending sentences with periods in a text was perceived as abrupt and insincere.
"Over text your often having these very quick back and forth, that mirrors spoken conversations," said Bindley. "We know on some level that over text that the addition of a period can really feel mean."
Though the punctuation debate is likely to continue to fill countless Slack channels and text message threads, Bindley advises people to use punctuation that makes sense to them.
"If you are naturally a bubbly person, I think its fine to use more than someone that's maybe not so bubbly," she said. "It really comes down to personal preference and your own comfort level."
For full interview, [click here] (https://cms.cheddar.com/videos/VmlkZW8tMjIwODk=).
A survey by the BMO Real Financial Progress Index found that 25 percent of Americans are pulling back on retirement contributions to offset the cost of inflation. This comes as market volatility reduced retirement savings with the S&P 500 shedding more than 12 percent this year alone.
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The dating app Bumble has sponsored bills and pushed lawmakers to criminalize the online practice of sending unsolicited nudes or “cyberflashing." Payton Iheme, Bumble's head of public policy for the Americas, joined Cheddar News to discuss why the app was going after the harassing behavior beyond its own platform. "Now, while we went to work internally in the company, and we created something called private detector to automatically blur those images so the user can decide if they want to see them, there's nothing for the rest of the internet," she said. "And so that's why we went to work with these laws."
