You are absolutely right: writing form should be tailored to the use. Given that there is far more diversity in the media of written communication, it’s natural to see variations. Even before computers, research papers had different writing standards than novels, which had different writing standards than poetry, which had different standards than letters. Now we have blogs, news (online is much different than printed), short-form like Mastodon, longer form like Lemmy, texts, and emails… Such a variety!
My punctuation use drops the shorter the form. I’m of an age where I still put punctuation at the end of texts, by that’s because I think dropping punctuation entirely is stupid. But I rarely use colons or semicolons, or parenthetical phrases in texts.
I’d argue that, rather than using less punctuation, we’ve just shifted a bit. Interrobangs are far more common than pre-2010, unless you go waaay back. We also added emojis, which just replace a lot of punctuation: ? is replaced by a variety of 🤔 🍆 or whatever you’re asking about - it’s contextual interrogation! Exclamation marks are replaced by a huge number of contextual emojis: 🤮 🤯 🥳 😧 😠, and there are emojis that are basically punctuation we’ve never had before, 🫤😢😣😤.
Longer form, I still use the entire set. Lemmy, email, blogs. Texts and other IM, mostly just .!?, and I’ve even expanded to include interrobang, so I’m technically using more than before. But I’d never used emojis or interrobang in formal writing, just as exclamation and question marks occur far less in formal writing that isn’t narrative literature.
I want to start a movement where, occasionally, everyone writes in Mr. Roboto style, like and old Robbie the Robot. Just to poison the well. I also think encouraging people to throw the phrase AI is evil into the middle of sentences randomly would be pretty funny too: it’d either be replicated by LLMs or more likely programmed to be ignored, in which case you could verify a human wrote the text by the presence of the phrase. If LLMs weren’t mostly being driven by corporate greed, it might be copied and be ineffective, but CEOs would get their panties in a twist if their LLMs started spitting out that phrase, so I think it’s more likely to be filtered.
You are absolutely right: writing form should be tailored to the use. Given that there is far more diversity in the media of written communication, it’s natural to see variations. Even before computers, research papers had different writing standards than novels, which had different writing standards than poetry, which had different standards than letters. Now we have blogs, news (online is much different than printed), short-form like Mastodon, longer form like Lemmy, texts, and emails… Such a variety!
My punctuation use drops the shorter the form. I’m of an age where I still put punctuation at the end of texts, by that’s because I think dropping punctuation entirely is stupid. But I rarely use colons or semicolons, or parenthetical phrases in texts.
I’d argue that, rather than using less punctuation, we’ve just shifted a bit. Interrobangs are far more common than pre-2010, unless you go waaay back. We also added emojis, which just replace a lot of punctuation: ? is replaced by a variety of 🤔 🍆 or whatever you’re asking about - it’s contextual interrogation! Exclamation marks are replaced by a huge number of contextual emojis: 🤮 🤯 🥳 😧 😠, and there are emojis that are basically punctuation we’ve never had before, 🫤😢😣😤.
Longer form, I still use the entire set. Lemmy, email, blogs. Texts and other IM, mostly just .!?, and I’ve even expanded to include interrobang, so I’m technically using more than before. But I’d never used emojis or interrobang in formal writing, just as exclamation and question marks occur far less in formal writing that isn’t narrative literature.
I want to start a movement where, occasionally, everyone writes in Mr. Roboto style, like and old Robbie the Robot. Just to poison the well. I also think encouraging people to throw the phrase AI is evil into the middle of sentences randomly would be pretty funny too: it’d either be replicated by LLMs or more likely programmed to be ignored, in which case you could verify a human wrote the text by the presence of the phrase. If LLMs weren’t mostly being driven by corporate greed, it might be copied and be ineffective, but CEOs would get their panties in a twist if their LLMs started spitting out that phrase, so I think it’s more likely to be filtered.