As far as punctuation, ending periods actually have negative emotion in text vernacular now for younger audiences and should almost never be used in 1-1 messaging. Exclamation points, commas, and question marks, great!
For abbreviations, it's simply know your audience. You should use them when everyone in the room knows them, but you have to think about that first before use. The step of thinking about it is a great mental step to add, but the article presents it more as a steadfast rule. Also, expanding them in parentheses can be a chance to educate your audience for the future even when you have people who don't know, like I'll do below :P
To me, the smallest point was actually the most interesting and valuable, and it was skated over entirely - communicating emotion and sentiment, particularly through emoji use. With WFH (Work From Home) especially, communicating emotion is very socially helpful. I've found a lot of engineers think "well I don't care/need so I'll skip the flowery additions for efficiency" and then leave many non-tech people and some engineering coworkers to decipher if this random slack ask is mad, passive aggressive, inquisitive, or a check-in. This has far worse effects longterm often than an unknown acronym.
Adding emojis can solve this, or if you don't like those, literally giving more social context in words can also do the trick. When we're talking in person, we always communicate emotion, even when it's not the primary purpose. I think many would do well to include that in their online messaging as well :)
It is interesting though. Looking back at chat history. If I am not writing multiple sentences, and even sometimes when I am, I tend to leave off the last period.
I think emoji reactions to messages, especially in off topic channels, are totally reasonable. And certain ones (+1, -1, 100, etc.) are OK for technical discussions. But don't feel people should be adding faces into the actual content of on topic work messages. But, the actual context in those conversations should be clear, and make them unnecessary.
One thing that actually drives me nuts is when people will keep their messages short. Write 5-10 words of a thought out, hit enter, and keep on going. You end up getting 7 notifications in quick succession, and none of it is complete. Please, just write out your entire though out as one singular cohesive message.
Emojis are good because words can be interpreted with a tone that was unintended, and can lead to all sorts of communication problems. It's small and simple, but an appropriate emoji helps convey our emotions in a way that is more difficult to in short, text based messages.
I agree about rapid short messages, I hate receiving 8 notifications about 1 short paragraph of text.
The book he mentions, Because Internet, goes into more detail. But to over-simplify, there were a few major generations of people joining the internet as well as a generation that never fully joined, and each one developed its own conventions for casual writing on their own. Some used the same mechanism to mean different things.
Social conversations are fluid and open-ended, with participants organically shifting between listening and speaking. A period however conveys finality, which is off-putting in such a human setting.
For example, “No.” sounds like the very stern “No” of someone who’s not willing to listen or discuss any further.
This sort of typing really drives me up the wall, too. I submitted a feature request to Slack about a year ago asking that implement some sort of throttle on notifications (they acknowledged my request, but took no action on it).
Basically, for example, I would want to set a throttle to be notified every minute of all messages that were received in the past 60 seconds. So if 4 messages were received in that timeframe, I would only be pinged once instead of 4 times.
I disagree about receiving multiple messages in a row. To me, composing longer messages (especially with multiple paragraphs) feels much more formal; it’s like writing an email or a letter rather than having a conversation. I do sometimes write like that, but only on the rare occasion that I need to be particularly formal.
Not in the content. But after the content of the whole message to indicate tone? I do that pretty much all the time, as there are generally multiple ways a message can be interpreted.
We can’t do facial expressions on chat, and we don’t have the length of content that comes with email (at least, I’d rather use one emoji than 50 extra words).
Is anyone else familiar with this and can shed some light?
Like that, right? ;)
And I’m left wondering if they just typed an extra period or whether they’re trailing off...
I ultimately come to this conclusion. A period is a tiny piece of a message. If something so small makes your message seem in some way negative, then your communication is already on the margin. You should look at other areas of your communication to improve.
My default view of messages in what seems quickly to be becoming the common text style (all lower-case with abbreviations and no punctuation, written in fits of stream-of-consciousness) expresses laziness and a sense of self-importance on the part of the author. I find that assuming good intentions of the author is a much better stance to take. Thus, I choose to interpret positively what might otherwise seem negative to me. If someone else is incapable of looking past a period, then my communication must be very poor indeed, and I must make efforts to improve it.
You're taking it all the way to an extreme where kids these days must be getting upset over periods in messages and wincing with tender emotions (which was a very popular takeaway when the study hit HN).
But here's an actual quote:
> University researchers examined how including or omitting a period in a one-word text response to an invitation — like “yeah,” “maybe” or “nope” — affected people’s understanding. “We found that if you put a period after those short, one-word responses, the people reading the texts … understand (it) as being more negative, less enthusiastic, than if they had no period,” co-author Celia Klin told Moneyish. “We’ve agreed that putting a period after a one-word response in a text conveys something like abruptness, annoyance, negativity.”
Sounds pretty reasonable to me for SMS/WhatsApp texting, and definitely something I agree with since ending a one-word statement with a period when you otherwise never use periods is clearly a statement no matter how small.
And of course, in typical fashion, word of mouth and the Chinese whispers game have bastardized that into what the above HNer claimed: "As far as punctuation, ending periods actually have negative emotion in text vernacular now for younger audiences and should almost never be used in 1-1 messaging."
For me, this started in the early 2000s with SMS, and really only applies to chat-style messages, which is why I have no problem using periods here.
I've never come across the period-as-negative idea before. From the discussion here, it sounds like in-group signalling. For me, punctuation is an unconsious part of writing, and it would take special effort (or a browser extension) to remove it so as not to be marked as an outsider.
It does a great job at not only showing how this evolution happened, especially around communicating emotions and things like sarcasm, but also at describing the different cohorts who started using the internet at different times and under different circumstances.
It actually has changed how I write on slack. I'm now for example more deliberate about omitting or including periods, break up what before would have been a long, email-like message into smaller messages.
It also made me aware that ellipses have different meaning for different age groups
That is extremely problematic, since I've already lost track of how many misparses (and resulting conflict over misunderstanding the meaning) have happened because of someone who wrote what should be multiple .-separated sentences as a single long and unpunctuated stream of text.
A memorable example: There is a huge difference between
I didn't know that. He did it.
I didn't know that he did it.> sure
and
> sure.
will be interpreted slightly differently from each other.
It seems that people read too much into the intent (imagined or real) in a text message rather than just the content.
As an older user, I perceive messages that use text spelling (e.g. u instead of you or prolly instead of probably) as unprofessional, but I don't let that get in the way of the conversation
I've learned to avoid abbreviations and acronyms whenever possible in writing. If it's fast back-and-forth messaging, that could be fine to save time typing. Otherwise, people are very good at seeing long names as single "symbols."
For example, I don't use "CI" for "confidence interval" in reports. I just write both words every time. No confusion, and I doubt there's a difference in reading speed.
Obviously, there are exceptions when space for text is limited (presentation slides, labels in a chart).
A laughing emoji would let us know that you think it's funny that people are this inarticulate, although it'd be a touch condescending.
An eye-roll emoji would indicate a frustration with the problem, suggesting that it personally affects you in some way — perhaps your relatives are using too many emojis and it irritates you personally.
A frown emoji, meanwhile, would suggest a more sincere concern for the state of written communication in our culture, and would imply that you think something important is being lost.
Explaining the meaning of those three unicode characters in context took an additional 480 characters. Can you see why people use them? They're very efficient.
There are plenty of uses of emoji that don’t add clarity, but I think it’s a bit much to say they can’t be used in a way that adds clarity at all.
I like to think you've done it on purpose.
I'm 28 for reference, and I get VERY different vibes from those younger than me who join slack, and those older (40+ or so). The difference in meaning for different punctuation for these crowds is SO evident, I feel like I'm always playing translator for even the language I grew up speaking and writing.
The biggest example of this is the ellipsis among the older crowd. In informal messaging that I grew accustomed to it went from being overused, to nowadays seeming like you are being sarcastic or angry about something. So among the younger crowd I see it almost never used anymore. On the other hand the older generations picked it up from how we used to use it, as a sort of pause. But they co-opted it as probably the most common punctuation used in their messaging. I'm not joking when I will sometimes receive a message from an older coworker that will contain an ellipsis every 5 words or so.
It's always been interesting deciphering the actual meaning of some messages based on solely age of the sender.
This all to say, deciphering punctuation at all in informal writing is an interesting game.
I've had a few profs that would the ellipsis for every single sentence, and my brain subconsciously treated his emails as mysterious. It's not too bad once you get used to it.
There's also the weird thing of younger people like myself avoiding proper punctuation/capitalization for the aesthetic. Mainly because a lack of proper writing can make certain messages feel more "relaxed" and casual, if that makes sense.
I don't think it's weird at all, and I don't think it's simply aesthetic. All these things (punctuation, capitalization, emoji/emoticons, representations of non-verbal communication like "lol" and "hmm", message boundaries, message send times) are ways of conveying tone, nuance, and a personal voice in an otherwise sterile, flat medium.
These nuances have been around as long as we've had instant messaging, but the specifics have changed over time. Representations of laughter are a good example: over the years we've had (in no order) "lol", "Lol", "LOL", "rofl", "ROFL", "lmao", "lmfao", "LMAO", "LMFAO", "hah", "haha", "hahaha", "HAHAHAHA", "roflmao", "roflcopter", and others. Over time the nuances of these options have changed, with some no longer au courant (the rofl family is currently outmoded), just as spoken slang and language rapidly evolve. Punctuation choices and so on follow similar patterns.
I do roll my eyes a little bit at some of the wild prescriptivism that can be found in this thread, which I think completely misses the point. The footnote from the original post I find especially infuriating:
>sloppy with their written communication, which is to say "careless and unsystematic; excessively casual".
Casual speech is not sloppy! Choices of punctuation, capitalization, and so on are deliberate.
So in order to avoid throwing your anecdata altogether, how many people of each age group did you communicate with using text form?
It could also be a case of when I do see it used regardless of age, it appears to either be overused, or rarely used, and overuse tends to lean older.
`,,,` have been a funny, casual alternative I've seen from and accidently seemed to have picked up from younger folk.
A tough side-effect of this I've seen though is the possibility of excluding some non-native English speakers, both in terms of making it harder for them to consume content because of it using a wider vocabulary, and making it harder for them to succeed (in things like interviews) because of higher communications standards.
I don't know where I fall on this, because it does allow for better communication, it just requires more from participants. In fact poor communicators would be excluded regardless of their native language.
Acronyms are nice when you've got a long, frequently used phrase, as long as everyone in the conversation knows what they mean. I think banning acronyms entirely would be eliminating all of the useful value from the practice of using acronyms, while not necessarily addressing the largest problem that the use of acronyms causes.
you can be perfectly clear in lowercase and with sparse punctuation
acronyms can be ambiguous, but to say then that we should all write formally is a huge leap
frankly anyone who can't write clearly like this is a poor writer
i also doubt it really excludes non-native speakers unless you're using a lot of slang/abbreviations
The more often people write informally, the more difficult it is for non-native speakers to learn correct grammar. I almost always use full sentences and correct punctuation in all forms of communication. But I make sure to always write correctly when I'm communicating with non-native speakers. I am doing them a disservice, otherwise. And it's also frustrating to me when I'm learning a language and what I'm reading from native speakers is below even my capability.
Also, I think there's a difference between making mistakes in a foreign language, and being lazy or not caring. For example, capitalizing the first letter of a sentence or the word "I" is something that 99% of people know they should do. So that mistake is not usually due to lack of fluency in a language.
I couldn't imagine writing without at least attempting to use proper grammar. Especially in German where ignoring capitalization makes a difference of night and day.
My reasoning has been similar to the one of the author, but more on a "positivity" than a plain productivity level. If it's easy for others to read my messages and not having to puzzle over them, I hope that it will leave them with overall a more positive association of writing/communicating with me. And that not only goes for professional texting, but writing with friends (or dating) as well. I know it won't always come out perfect, but overall I think it shows some level of respect towards the other person.
Periods + capitalization (when writing in English) over IM comes across as "cold" to me, whether or not someone's using emoji; unless they're above a certain age, of course.
The main one that trips me up is when people use acronyms I'm not familiar with. Then I try to Google for them, but sometimes it's hard to find, or ambiguous.
Which makes me wonder if the author of the article used the noun "ask" deliberately, and whether it simply means "question".
Using that word out of carelessness in an article about the clarity of communication, with a mention of non-native speakers would be ironic.
There are some people who basically braindump many lines of text with no punctuation but they are not the most common and it's a signal that the person does not respect the room- so they are somewhat scorned even if not directly.
People will also be confused if you shout out a message to the room without appropriate pauses (commas or periods) or without the right tone (question marks).
At one time most written language didn't put spaces between words (some still do), and many languages don't write vowels. That's not a good reason for doing the same in your informal English Slack messages.
You can write an informal message and still use punctuation.
i havent used any but ive been perfectly clear
Hi Corporate Counsel,
As discussed, I am now doing the thing, description description. Thanks.
Otherwise email was just a way to write something down that you didn't want read or acted upon.
Corporate communication varies quite a bit, of course.
In my case, all lowercase and lack of punctuation don't bother me or slow me down. (I'll agree on uncommon acronyms hindering understanding.)
To reduce some frustrations... listen to linguist McWhorter explaining that people should think of texting (or Slack) as "transcribed informal speech" -- instead of formal writing.[1]
That said, the author Mitch Lee's bio says he's a cofounder of Penny. If you are employed by him and are communicating at his company via Slack, it's better for your career if you follow his guidelines.
I can't watch the video right now, but even in informal speech, I hear periods and commas. I think that those are necessary for communication. Not including them, as I mention in another comment above (or below?), induces a cognitive load on the reader. Nobody should be asking for perfection on Slack, but mostly correct should be the bar.
you hear pauses, which can be communicated in more than one way
as shown here
...was this unduly hard to understand?
For example: You must always be mindful of privacy laws when handling personal health information (PHI). Remember, that you may only access PHI when necessary to do your job, and never to fulfill personal curiosity about a patient.
Unfortunately, this doesn't work for a chat room because it's not meant to be read from beginning to end. My personal rule is to never use acronyms, unless I can follow the above rule.
I've worked in many different industries, and learning acronyms has been a consistent and pointless barrier to achieving productivity. I don't want to put that onto anyone else. Even worse, you run the risk of your reader ignoring the lesson entirely, simply because they don't know what the acronym means.
In and of itself, "PHI" does not seem any more important than any other acronym. On the other hand, "personal health information," has an obvious connotation of importance.
Very interesting book and worth reading to understand how to tailor communication for the medium.
This is probably because:
- IMs are already formatted to show the end of each message (chat bubble, etc), so a period communicates extra 'finality' beyond what is necessary;
- Sentence fragments are normal and expected, but seem weird with a period at the end;
- Using formality in an informal setting can create a sense of emotional distance;
- IM cues like these are likely established and spread by people who have mostly used IM in non-professional settings, with friends and significant others, and those norms are then brought with them when interpreting the IMs they receive in a professional setting. If you never communicated with your significant other via text message, you've probably never needed to express as many subtle emotional signals into your texts, and so just treat them like emails. But if you have, then you eventually pick up how powerful punctuation can be at communicating emotion in that medium.
Eg.
> I'll be home late tonight
>> Okay
VS:
> I'll be home late tonight
>> Okay.
Because while I totally agree with the individual that you are replying too, I TOTALLY see how it could seem ridiculous to someone with the periods-end-sentences perspective.
Let me try and come up with an ideal example. Consider this IM to a friendly teammate concerning an important (but not critical) meeting:
> did we get everything sorted out for the meeting this afternoon? we cant screw it up again
> Did we get everything sorted out for the meeting this afternoon? We can't screw it up again
> Did we get everything sorted out for the meeting this afternoon? We can't screw it up again.
In my world, the first two communicate pretty much the same thing. In the first example, you could probably even replace the question mark with a comma. I would likely send the second message, as I prefer descriptive, detail-adding punctuation. I would be less likely to send the third message to a young coworker because it seems standoffish.
Having said all that, any of the three messages would suffice. Someone mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but we - or at least the younger generation - have all become quite good at code switching. Crazy times
Hey.
Statement: We got the tickets for tonight!
Response: Yay.
I've had people get actually angry with me for doing it.
But that's kind of ancillary to the point of this post, no? The main point it's trying to drive home is be as informative as possible. Don't assume your audience knows your tone, your conventions, your abbreviations.
I suspect this is largely for those who have newly entered the work force, who may only know texting style communication (with friends, shared corpus of knowledge), and formal business communication, and this is to warn them that Slack, while less formal than the latter, doesn't imply the shared context that the former would often have.
If I want to explicitly leave a thought open for continuation, especially in chat style communication, I place three periods at the end of a sentence. I consider that an invitation to the reader's mind to conclude the sentence. So it's either one period or three of them for me, but none at all just feels wrong.
Confused.
Mostly because most chat messages are single sentences.
So I guess that people leave them out when they aren't part of a full paragraph of text.
For example, I would read "Sounds good" in a generally positive way just like when someone is saying that in person, but when I read "Sounds good." I read it without any emotion in my head which sounds wierd.
Like project managers think they're channelling Bezos with "?" messages. I can see how some people interpret "stupid" as "powerful," when that's their experience of authority and then they just imitate it, but it's worth being aware that it breeds contempt.
Heh, my Slack messages are way more casual than Tinder messages. I think the essential difference is I just met someone who I'm talking to on Tinder (hopefully :D), while on Slack I'm probably talking to someone I've known for years; it's fundamentally more casual.
With care, short messages can be very effective.
Also, if people feel like casual or "sloppy" communication will be judged negatively, they might often choose to say nothing at all instead of sharing half-baked ideas, which probably reduces organic creativity and innovation, even if it leads to fewer interruptions.
So while I get the point this post is making, there are costs on both sides here. And some of the worst downsides of the casual style (interruptions, in particular) can be minimized by adding more structure around sync vs. async communication, protected focus time, and using different mediums when appropriate.
People should go for the middle ground on Slack. If you miss a period, so what? But skipping all of them just to be "casual"? That induces a cognitive load on your reader that you shouldn't.
I started a new job ~2 months ago and things that everyone thinks everyone understands I simply did not. These weren't documented acronyms but rather "socially understood" acronyms that meant each time I didn't understand something I had to message someone asking.
While onboarding the amount of times I message people asking for help is so much that it gets uncomfortable (for me, at least) so minimizing the acronyms would be super helpful.
As a counter-point, though, it could be that each culture/tribe needs their own language that only they can understand and it creates this feeling of comradery? Just a thought.
I personally start to struggle with this after the first year when the grace period to ask "stupid" questions is over.
The time you spend composing a message should be proportional to the number of people in your intended audience.
I disagree with the details of this argument, the costs seem strawman ish. You quickly get used to writing styles, chat systems are an ongoing ecosystem and you adapt quickly.
What I would suggest is to try and make your messages self contained with context. Avoid private messaging and ask things on open channels, too much information is hidden away in private messages. Even if your question is really for a specific person. Seeing conversations helps build narratives and context for teams.
If you can write clearly without using these tools or if you're writing in a situation where style is more important than clarity, fine. Go nuts.
If you just can't be bothered to make, like, five extra keypresses... C'mon, man.
It's also important to consider the range of reactions. For those who understand an acronym, they likely won't even notice; for those who don't understand it, they risk losing face and potentially looking like an idiot when they have to ask what the acronym means. The "time saved" is helpful, sure, but considering how people will respond goes beyond "how much time will they spend asking a follow-up question?" and also includes "how will they feel if they don't understand this?"
* Posting in a highly-visible channel where most/if not all people will lack context. Treat it like an email and make sure it's punctually and grammatically correct. * Posting in a team channel where the attitude is casual. Pump those messages out pretty much like you're talking them.
This doesn't mesh with how I feel toward Slack. Slack itself is the thing that's disrupting my productivity and deterring deeper thinking by pinging me all the time. When I open Slack, the vast majority of the time, I'm looking to express my point as clearly AND concisely as possible so I can get back to doing whatever it was, which is 99% of time more important. As a result I use (or don't use) grammatical conventions, capitalization, and emoji depending on the context of my message and what will allow me to get my entire message across the fastest, and hopefully correctly.
If I'm messaging the person I've pairing with all day, or if I'm coordinating with my team about who will pick up a story, I'm much less likely to give my message all the proper formatting. These people what I'm like and how I tend to communicate, and so I can rely on that prior knowledge to "cut corners" here and there. I'm also much, much more likely to use emoji because I can communicate my intentions and my "intonation" nearly instantly, without having to sit there and worry about wordsmithing my whole message.
That being said, if I'm message in a large public channel that perhaps has multiple teams or belongs to a team I don't normally interact with, I'll spend much more time wordsmithing and editing to make sure I'm following proper conventions - mostly for the sake of clarity.
It does make some very salient points (think about how others could misinterpret your message, expand acronyms/use them sparingly, write to your audience, etc.) but I think they bought a little bit too much into the "Slack has replaced email" argument. For me, the main benefit of Slack over email is the lowered barrier to entry to starting a conversation and the ability to keeping it flowing, and part of achieving that is being okay with lowering the standards of communication.
I totally agree about shorthand. It can be unnecessarily ambiguous. But punctuation isn't related to acronyms, I don't think? As others have pointed out, punctuation over instant-messaging services can add meaning you don't intend. I generally don't capitalize the first letter of sentences or end messages with periods in IM applications.
If they had just named it "A case for avoiding use of shorthand in Slack", I'd 100% agree.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2...
> that's an indication that the text message period has taken on a life of its own. It is no longer just the correct way to end a sentence. It's an act of psychological warfare against your friends.
It's so bizarre that people perceive some nefarious intent because a sentence ends with a period.
For me, respectful written communication also includes proper punctuation & capitalization — since it makes reading easier.
General chat: Proper punctuation. Keep sentences terse. Reply promptly. Leave no room for ambiguity.
Direct message: Often if a matter takes place outside of a public channel, it is because a duty or responsibility is being delegated to you or a sensitive subject is involved. One should take extra precaution to speak forthrightly to ease the recipient, but also take measures to be prompt and present.
Makes a world of difference.
The most important thing I've learned about online tone is that it's less about what you say and more about how you tell others to speak to you.
I think there are some good points here for technical writing. But it's easy to forget how memorable playful communication can be.
E.g. a responding via haiku or something no-caps and full of enjambment, might be extremely memorable. (especially in a chat full of technical writing style).
It's probably a good idea to tell people this instead of just assuming everyone knows... but it's kind of engrained in the culture of the communities I'm in.
"What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure."
I would rather use E-mail, if only there was a FidoNet-like culture of using it properly among the users and the E-mail client software authors (that would enable proper threading and include quoting only the particular parts you answer).
IMHO the best communication format is a HN-like comments thread.
To which I say: "Duh!? What, you thought people who do it don't realise that's the case? That's exactly why they do it, even!".
The more common context the producer and the consumer share, the less need there is for punctuation, spelling out abbreviations or other niceties.
but this article claimed to provide justification for focusing on grammar and style in communication. i do not see that justification here.
i will continue to not capitalize my slack messages.
I like to think that sometimes, my chat style gives others a little bit of break-think amidst all the rapid-fire.
GTM.
Go To Meeting Google Tag Manager Go to Market Good to Me
It's so frustrating when external requests without context come to me with this.
This doesn't mesh with how I feel toward Slack. Slack itself is the thing that's disrupting my productivity and deterring deeper thinking by pinging me all the time. When I open Slack, the vast majority of the time, I'm looking to express my point as clearly AND concisely as possible so I can get back to doing whatever it was, which is 99% of time more important. As a result I use (or don't use) grammatical conventions, capitalization, and emoji depending on the context of my message and what will allow me to get my entire message across the fastest, and hopefully correctly.
If I'm messaging the person I've pairing with all day, or if I'm coordinating with my team about who will pick up a story, I'm much less likely to give my message all the proper formatting. These people what I'm like and how I tend to communicate, and so I can rely on that prior knowledge to "cut corners" here and there.
I'm also much, much more likely to use emoji because I can communicate my intentions and my "intonation" nearly instantly, without having to sit there and worry about wordsmithing my whole message. Sure, sending "I'm done for the day" and "I'm done for the day <wave emoji>" mean the same thing, my hope is that by including the waving emoji it shows I'm not signing off out of frustration, but instead that I'm just at the end of my hours and it's time to log off. This is a bit of a contrived example, as I don't think hardly anyone would read the first message and think "they're mad", but I hope my argument is still clear.
That being said, if I'm message in a large public channel that perhaps has multiple teams or belongs to a team I don't normally interact with, I'll spend much more time wordsmithing and editing to make sure I'm following proper conventions - mostly for the sake of clarity.
The author does make some very salient points (think about how others could misinterpret your message, expand acronyms/use them sparingly, write to your audience, etc.), and as a whole I think erring on the side of more "professional" and "standardized" is always a safe bet, but I can't help but feel that they bought a little bit too much into the "Slack has replaced email" argument (not really his fault, that is how they like to market it). For me, the main benefit of Slack over email is the lowered barrier to entry to starting a conversation and the ability to keeping it flowing; part of achieving that is being okay with somwhat lowering the standards of communication.
Unrelated: I posted this comment and then tried to correct a typo, and the edit didn't go through. After I hit "Update" the page would just refresh and the text stayed the same. Anyone seen that before?