Has the full stop come to a full stop?

Of late, I’ve noticed that the humble full stop seems to be AWOL from an increasing number of posts and emails. And it’s not just stuff written by the yoof, no. I think that’s why I find it surprising – the tiniest of punctuation mark is left out of chat by folk with quite a few years on me, who probably had good grammar drilled into them by strict teachers who used creative methods to get their point across. Maybe it’s a rebellion?

To be fair, it’s mostly in emails where the author is not writing paragraphs and the sentences are short, and given their own lines.

A bit like this

So there’s a keyboard return

Which I guess is meant to signify the sentence is finished

Maybe that’s why the full stop is surplus

I dunno

But it leaves me hanging

And it looks a bit weird

A full stop takes up hardly any pixel real estate. Takes no effort at all to pop it at the end of a sentence and the whole point of it is it’s is important for clarity. They can also look really pretty, depending on the font and size!

Now, clearly I’m no Giles Brandreth or anything, but I, like many of us, appreciate the use of decent grammar. As a mum of two boys at primary, both at the beginning of their literary careers (The Car That Turned Into A Dragon is gonna be epic) it’s important to keep to the basic principles of starting and ending a sentence, otherwise no-one will have a clue what’s going on in that story.

Maybe it’s just the evolution of language or something, but I’m a fan of the full stop. Period.