This one really surprises me, if someone contacted me without bothering to type a proper sentence I would just think they're an idiot. Everyone I know always starts a sentence with a capital letter, no matter the platform. They all know how to use the shift key.
This isn't even gate keeping, people use slang all the time, it is basic English. News, books, articles, tutorials, emails, teams, share point... Everything I read every day has proper capitalization.
As others pointed out, capitalization is similar to white space, punctuation, and other tools that English has when it comes to informal communication.
Especially online, you can invoke a lot of imagery and thoughts and emotions by simply playing with the rules of English in a live-chat setting. Try to imagine in a chat the following sentence with different stylizations:
"The Customer is always right, so we need to work to correct this"
"thE CUsTomer iS aLWays RIght, So WE neEd To WoRK To cOrrECT thiS"
"the customer is always right, so we need to work to correct this :))))"
The first is quite formal and it's direct; perhaps it could be understood as sarcasm if someone knows you well, but it could also be taken at face value and quite seriously, or it could be taken as a throw-away statement.
The second indicates a mocking tone and maybe even resentment, taking the time to mimic a meme and also to purposefully make the sentence silly looking.
The third introduces the sarcastic smiley (I disagree with the article's interpretation, as I've always seen :))) to more represent desperation or exasperation)
With traditional rules of English, tone is difficult to convey with a single sentence and it's built with the surrounding text as a point of consideration to understand how to interpret a statement; with chat, this is far more difficult to communicate the emotion/intention as chats can be very fast and disconnected, and it's hard to follow the attitude and mood of a person to understand their intended messaging.
You could try to divorce the message from the emotions, which might lead to expediting some discussions, but it also leaves a lot of room for incorrect/wrong interpretations. Even if you divorce yourself from such concerns and try to be above it, your conversation partners might not approach it the same way.
The evolution of chat might be bastardizing the classic rules of English, but it's quite expressive and personally has made many conversations and relationships much easier with fewer misunderstandings.
These "gen-Z" rules are great if you are 15 and have nothing more to do with your time than worry if Emily fancies you or not by how many chins she gave her ascii text art smile. I was there: when I was a teenager on IRC and MSN messenger I was on hooks at the smallest detail; how long was it taking someone to reply, have they received the message, oh-no they're replying now I better not type out a message, they signed off "ilyvm" not "ily" they must have really liked me today...
This sounds quite dismissive, and it is in a way. "Old" people don't need to understand the difference between "k" and "k.". Gen-Z need to communicate to their audience and there's nothing more embarrassing than old people learning young people lingo.
how about simply taking the sentences at face value?
"We need to improve on XXX"
Almost certainly means exactly what it says, no need to look for hidden emotions where most probably there are none.
We as humans have used written communication for millennia and no emotion got lost when they needed to be conveyed.
Yes, my social-economic status is defined specifically by how I use capital letters.
This netiquette is on chatting. And chatting in lower has been the case of choice since early IRC days.
The one thing that was completely true though was the smile thing “good job :)” is extremely toxic.
Most of this list is just things people tend to do but wouldn’t notice if you didn’t.
Especially when paired with phrases like "who dat". You're just coming across as doing the barely minimum effort to write. Like people that mumble because they can't be bothered with communicating to you.
An "idiot" does things without knowing or considering why. People choosing to break old capitalization rules to better communicate are a step above those who can't handle that the english they learned in grade school no longer exists.
Other than that plenty of non idiots forget to capitalize a sentence.
Perhaps people should just read the content of the message and stop worrying about the set-dressing. "They capitalized, they must be a nerd", "she ended that will a full stop, she must be mad!".
I’d say that copying trend is mostly visible in the early- to middle-millennial cohort who are starting to realize that they’re not the center of the world anymore, a boomer-like reaction on a more reduced scale, if you wish.
(These days I aim for proper sentences also in instant messaging, acknowledging the asynchronous nature of it. But if I happen to catch my conversation partner active, I might switch to the more informal, "verbal" style.)
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[1]: You may think you speak in proper sentences, but try to transcribe an audio recording literally some day. You might be surprised!
Sure, but doesn't that just mark you (and me) as older millenials / gen-X?
See the first email in this article:
https://www.businessinsider.in/emails-from-googles-eric-schm...
Wasn't the whole Blackberry shtick about having a full qwerty keyboard so the business folk could send messages that didn't look like T9 gibberish?
Those examples just sound real lazy Gen Z writing
The other ones I kinda agree (with measure), but this one is awful. Then they ask why "is it so hard to get a job". Job market issues aside, don't come across as a dork.
Not disagreeing with you, but I think what constitutes as being a dork depends heavily on the situation (workplace culture, etc.). Writing like a Gen Z doesn't necessarily make one a dork.
I'd argue that the reverse is true: not writing like everyone else (i.e. completely ignoring the so called "Gen Z Netiquette") makes you a dork for being inept at adapting to the new social norm.
If I am trying to communicate something or it's the first message then it's always capitalized with the usual punctuation. Maybe even a semi-colon if I am feeling listy.
Wait till you encounter would of should of could of -.-
it’s a bit of a power move but also makes it easier to establish relationships
Not all of it obviously and I don’t even think that’s strictly a Gen Z thing specifically (much of it could have been written about my mother for example) but JFC it sounds emotionally draining way to live your life.
I work with a fairly large and diverse IT team with age ranges from 22 to 60+; a lot of this involves disagreements as is natural with any conversations with a large group of people.
Discussions with the younger demographic are far more productive and faster as they're quite specific in their statements and when there is a disagreement, they put it out there fairly openly, explaining intent and feelings, and when I reciprocate, we get to a faster understanding of one another and any potential misunderstandings we might have had, view points we hadn't considered, or parts that aren't clear for us. The initial conversations take a bit longer, but ultimately end up with all parties understanding the situation well. It's quite healthy I think.
With the older age group, I definitely know _when_ they're angry or upset about something or when they disagree with me, but I rarely know _why_. Trying to slow down the conversation and have the same "help me understand what you're thinking/feeling so we can better communicate" often is not received well, and while the conversations are more direct initially, they last far longer and result in more tirades, walls of text, and dozens of arguments with loose or no connection to the topic at hand.
I don't see the younger persons as being sensitive, I see them as being specific; I think they're better trained socially to express themselves and reflect on their reactions and their state, and embracing this by participating in the same way is very freeing. I can have what might be considered difficult discussions (corrections, disciplinary actions, etc) and understand that while likely the conversation partner is not happy, they feel understood, I've presented my point of view, and when presented with new information, all sides have been very receptive.
With my older colleagues, the same sensitivity and emotions are there, but I'm far less aware of it even if I specifically take actions to show I want to understand more.
There is definitely a culture clash, and I think that the reactions of "snow flakes" and "triggered" are not accurate, and it's more about two persons separated by a common language failing to communicate. Given how well conversations with my younger colleagues go, I'm more inclined to prefer this model.
Well, to give just a few examples:
* The worst interpretation of a sentence said by politicians is usually accurate
* In contractual law, the worst interpretation of a clause is the one you need to prepare for
* In advertising, the absolute worst interpretation of a phrase is usually accurate
* If you get a letter of recommendation, the worst interpretation is the intended one
So you adapt to this world.
Actually, that might be a major alert. Yes, young people feel very insecure nowadays, and I bet much more than dork-me when I was 17. Spending time online doesn’t help feeling socially apt, and it builds up as an entire part of that generation identifying as socially afraid.
But yeah, I can see how that’s clearly a recipe for disaster.
But don't worry, people are generally able to adapt to the other person, knowing that a boomer (or non-lit gen-z) might be oblivious to some rules, and is not out to scare you with a plain smiley ;)
If most of your interactions are online then yeah, I guess you’re going to have to be a lot more explicit about showing positive reinforcement all the time.
Hah, I think that's just part of being a young adult, isn't it?
just think back to your own ways of communication within your circles of people, that would be 'subtle' like that, and just, realize that 'this is just other people coming up with their own things'. like, even bro culture is chock full of social cues, subtleties, unspoken things, 'if they do this, you do that', and so on. it's truly not new in any sense, especially not in regards to what you call "insecurity". and 'sensitivity' is not a bad thing by any means. especially around and with your closest people.
Get an iPhone, like 90% of Gen Z. Or gtfo.
All, and I really do mean ALL, messages that arrive on my phone are over whatsapp, telegram or discord.
The green/blue bubble thing is classist and problematic and bringing it up is frankly embarrassing.
But yeah, that's about it. Everything else is via some messenger service, mostly Discord or Facebook.
Apple's Messages
> Who TF is still using
Americans
That sounds like a feature.
We still don't use SMS, because it sucks in every single way compared to bespoke chat apps like Telegram, Signal or WhatsApp.
You wish. Maybe in America. The rest of the world not. SMS are either for SPAM, for secure login PINs and for goverment advices. Not used by anyone anymore.
Not that it matters, I'm not American.
But what does it mean when the third boyfriend of my first boyfriend whose first boyfriend I was keeps watching my Instagram stories but not following me, considering my first boyfriend blocked me everywhere? Are they sitting there together laughing at my stories? Does he watch me out of low self confidence? He must know I know he is watching them. Should I write him? That kind of would violate my rule to accept my first ex desire not to communicate with me ever again.
Young people / social media communication and whole new categories of communication channels / signs/cues like getting your story watched is quite complex!
I proposed that they were (sort of) pronouncing the punctuation, as in "I'll be home. Period.", and it seems to sound that way. Odd, but it seems wide-spread.
I refuse to do this on Reddit. I long for a simpler time when it was literally impossible to tell who was being sarcastic and who is a genuine crazy person.
If you find yourself finding smug, try looking at an old Reddit rage comic/4chan greentext/usenet flamewar, depending on your age.
Your point is well taken, and thankfully I have neither a pony tail nor a motorcycle, but I am quite likely to observe 40 years of habit and driving in the guardrails of the language.
Or, ya know, don’t read shit into the message that isn’t there.
My generation did it too.
Social progress is not linear growth but sinusoidal.
> - Socrates, 400 B.C.
>Every time some new generation starts to create its own identity, some proportion of the previous dominant generation reacts defensively by attacking it with wilful ignorance and disdain. It's a tragic way to age. Worse than a diadema and a peneia.
> - the youth, 400 B.C.
---
>The children now love the internet; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love reddit in place of blog posts. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer use facebook while their uncles still do. They contradict their parents, text before company, gobble up memes on TikTok, twerk, and tyrannize their teachers.
> - boomers, 2023 A.D.
>Every time some new generation starts to create its own identity, some proportion of the previous dominant generation reacts defensively by attacking it with wilful ignorance and disdain. It's a tragic way to age. Worse than a ponytail and a motorbike.
> - devnullbrain, 2023 A.D.
Current youth seems to suffer from many more mental disorders (such as depression) than before. Share of people who had sex by their early twenties dropped significantly, which may be a consequence of having less intimacy and more solitude. Non-academically-talented young men seem to be less successful than ever before, to the degree that even liberal coastal media stopped making fun of them and started describing the situation as dire and in need of addressing.
Such problems may be fake (percepted, but not real), but they can, in fact, be real. We are not doing ourselves or anyone else a favor by invoking glib, thought-terminating clichés about the old eternally grumbling about the young.
There must be a middle way between the "get off my lawn" and "this is an ancient trope that only deserves mocking" attitudes.
> It was crafted by a student, Kenneth John Freeman, for his Cambridge dissertation published in 1907. Freeman did not claim that the passage under analysis was a direct quotation of anyone; instead, he was presenting his own summary of the complaints directed against young people in ancient times.
And don't criticize what you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly aging
Please get out of the new one if you can't lend your hand
For the times, they are a-changin-
Same with the difference colours of laughter "lol, rofl, haha, hahaha, lmao, ha." They're all just laughing but I bet you had different ideas about how each of them feel. This happens with language at large, synonymous words pick up nuanced differences so that we can express ourselves better, they aren't codified they just spread naturally.
I think for full stops, it's like the difference between familiar language and polite language. If you are too polite with a close friend you give off the impression that you're not close enough for casual language, which can be insulting.
The only one that is new (and therefore annoying to me as an Old Internet Man) is the insistance of adding emojis into every sentence
For a while I could guess someones approximate age because of it, but now some of my 40+ friends have started emojiing like a 14 year olds too
But it's also great for dry humor over text. Like when you switch to corporate-speak as a joke between friends:
A: "Looks like our main factory just blew up"
B: "Yes. Given the prevailing macroeconomic conditions, I felt that downsizing that factory was critical to actioning the quarterly plan."
---
Or alternatively, when you're sending a flurry of messages and want to show that you're done with the thought:
A: "Looks like things are improving"
A: "Like, the RAM use just dropped by ~20%"
A: "the GC probably just finished."
- Ending a sentence with period sounds overly serious for one-liner or short messages. If you write multiple sentences in a message it's still OK to use periods (though writing a long paragraph over multiple messages can also come off as serious, so ultimately it depends on the tone you want to convey in your message)
I have a feeling many would have problems reading basic articles where their attention would scream about jumping paragraphs.
and this isn't a gen z thing. it's just how instant messaging has worked forever.
or like some people
i chat with
who send the whole sentence
as separate messagesIt's not done to be edgy, or to fit in, or anything like that. Its different tones in text. If the other party doesn't speak this language, then the communication becomes very literal, very formal. Kind of like how someone who is oblivious to social cues comes across in spoken conversations, only without the stigma, as its quite normal to not know this stuff. But it's much harder to 'feel' the other person.
If you read someone's text and then also read their Instagram story and you still haven't replied, that's fine. If anything it's a bit of a power move. But really it's just what ends up happening when you're busy and don't have time to dick around on social media and overthink shit.
The article smacks of a mild anxiety disorder which is a common affliction of youth (sadly increasingly these days it's not so mild). The author would do well to ignore other people's petty shit and spend the next decade preoccupied with kicking ass at whatever he's best at.
And rules like in the article would all be easy to remember. What's not in the article is whether/what skills you'll need to develop to process all this information and noise.
For example, I remember seeing a busy chat room for the first time in the mid-'90s, and there was so much people talking, and it was scrolling seemingly too fast to read. (Bonus: I was on a then-vintage green CRT terminal, HP 2392A, at that moment, so incomprehensible scrolling of symbols was not entirely unlike the Matrix visual.)
But after some experience with the chat, it was no longer overwhelming. I could glance at the scrollage and have a sense of who was talking, what was being discussed, and possibly some meta of what was going on. And, for incoming messages, I could be tracking and selectively focusing among the often multiple concurrent threads of conversation.
I suppose skills a bit analogous to that might include how to manage the many different online services today you have to be on today, applying critical processing to advertising/engagement feed algorithms, juggling all this inefficient stuff with more real-life things, etc.
All the rules around instagram likes and reposting, the rules around “k”, that “:)” is passive aggressive etc. A lot of that feels juvenile which makes sense if it’s a gen z post. I’d guess it’ll stop once out of teens and early to mid twenties.
I think when people are more secure/confident they stop doing as much meta analysis of this kind.
Social media platforms approve.
An entire generation has been trained by Mark Zuckerberg to boost engagement on his properties
Edit: I added a few emojis in the original message, but it seems automatically removed—another nice thing for hacker news.
And that is before taking into account totally arbitrary shortcuts and meanings are introduced in various communities.
As a communication tool within a tight group, sure. But outside that emojis are pretty darn bad. Unless you stick to the subset that pretty closely maps to ascii smileys.
Wouldn’t this make the author a millennial?
I guess I’ll still confused about the talk of Yahoo messenger along with this:
>As I’m stepping into my late 20s…
What is Gen Z? My rule of thumb has been “people that definitely don’t remember 9/11” to distinguish between two very different generations.
The idea that there’s a special GenZ rule about full stops is bullshit. It’s all just tone and context. If you’re texting someone who evidently likes ending every message with a full stop, you obviously aren’t going to assume every single message is insulting (unless you’re an idiot or very paranoid). If you’re texting with someone who never uses full stops but then they suddenly use one at the end of a message and the message is kind of abrupt (like if it’s refusing a request) then it might feel kind of ‘firm’. This is something any intelligent/sensitive person, at any age, could pick up on, or not. It’s nothing to do with GenZ. It’s been this way since the start of internet messaging. It’s just recently become a dumb meme that fills column inches in newspapers because it creates a confused talking point where boomers etc are supposed to be aghast that they’ve been accidentally offending GenZ people by using full stops. It’s just dumb, dumb, dumb.
That's not a gen z thing. That's an entitle US social media projection.
It's like if MSN Messenger status were back again, and young people that I know are loving it :)
I guess some ideas are fun no matter the generation. There are also older people who got to experience MSN Messenger, and are asking when the music status updates will come too!
Meta/Fb just brought a decades-old staple into their app, and I find that amusing.
As a writer, try to follow the style your audience expects. That advice applies to informal personal communications. But don't engage heavily in this practice as a reader. It can be counterproductive to communication.
Sentence-s, well structured sentences (with it punctuation marks and capitalization) are in this context like evoking latin phrases let alone a fortiori whole paragraphs.
If one takes chatgpt into the equation writing essays will be as calculating without a calculator for the next adolescent generation and used mainly as intimidation given the current education system - or preferably a playful approach at pattern recognition emerging from formal rules conveying abstract concepts.
People must really think I hate them lol.
"Disclaimer: theoretically speaking I’m a genZ. But I could never identify myself as one because I never quite know about most of the rules until recently. This is a gen Z edition, because gen Z practices these rules a lot, not because I’m one."
I don't think the generation you're born in is something you identify with. Nor do I think that people "practice" the generational rules, as these "rules" are the result of their behaviour not something that one would practice/actively strive to do. As such, no matter what you do, that actions and behaviour is of the generation that you're born into.
Example: You don't choose your parents, nor do you choose your siblings.
If most of your siblings engage in daily running but you don't, saying that you don't identify as a child of you parents because children of your parents engage in daily running, is a bit of a backwards to the objective truth. (I can't think of a better way to put it into words, but I hope that fellow thinkers can see the logic that I'm trying to explain.)
Maybe something like this: It is illogical to define yourself by the actions of others.
Or:
The actions of others, front define who you are.
tl;dr: You are GenZ not because of what you do. But because what you do, is done by GenZ.
Edit: You are not a man because you do manly things. Things are manly because a man does them.
The only thing that surprised me was that "outside" simply means "outside your home" now.
Is this a thing now? Smileys are bad?
Am I doing it right?