Now, no full stops needed

London: A beloved punctuation mark, the full stop, is slowly dying. The period, the end-of-sentence marker, whatever you call it, is being replaced with exclamation marks, ellipses, line breaks and emoticons, and, in situations where none of these seems appropriate, it is being left out altogether.

The dot that Aristophanes of Byzantium bestowed upon us in 200 BC is becoming superfluous; it is now deemed to be too serious, too stuffy and lacking in sincerity.

American students found that only 29 per cent were using them to end their messages, but its fall from favour is now backed up with scientific research.

A team at the Department of Psychology at the State University of New York at Binghamton recently completed a study entitled Texting insincerity: The role of the period in text messaging.

With the help of the university’s undergraduates, a number of messages were scored for perceived sincerity and the results show that using a full stop is a bad way to convey heartfelt emotion.

Reporting the findings of the study, The Washington Post equated the use of a full stop as an act of psychological warfare.