Last weekend, I sent an email to someone through my personal email and my eight-year-old son looked at me and said, “What is this, 2010?”

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While it’s true that email has become a lesser form of communication outside of the business environment and text messaging has replaced email in much of our daily lives, I just can’t stop myself from not using proper punctuation which is exactly what researchers at Binghamton University say we should do.

Whenever something is sent through text rather than spoken directly to someone, it can be hard to convey the tone of the text and perhaps that’s why we all seem to be shackled to emojis.

For instance, if you think something is really funny but think that the receiver of the text might not necessarily know whether or not you think it’s funny or if they should show pity on you, you might put a laughing crying face. Or, if you type something sarcastic and want to really make sure that the person reading your text understands the sarcasm, you might add an eye-roll emoji followed by a laughing face.

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Apparently, according to researchers at Binghamton University, the use of emojis is perfectly fine, but the use of periods is not.

Binghamton University researchers claim that when we end our texts with a period at the end of a word or sentence, people read that as us being less sincere.

In a way it makes sense. We’ve all gotten the standard “okay” or “ok” reply followed by a period. The period makes it comes across as final, end of the discussion, almost flippant. But still – what about using proper grammar?

If you don’t want to come across as insincere but you don’t have more to say, researchers say you should end your text with an exclamation point. So, instead of saying “Okay.” You would type, “Okay!” and it makes you look like you’ve got a soul or something like that.

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Actually, the researchers say the exclamation point makes people trust the texter the most. So…um, exclaim away?

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