'Punctuation Is Dead Because the iPhone Keyboard Killed It' (androidauthority.com) 138
Android Authority's Rita El Khoury argues that the decline in punctuation use and capitalization in social media writing, especially among younger generations, can largely be attributed to the iPhone keyboard. "By hiding the comma and period behind a symbol switch, the iPhone keyboard encourages the biggest grammar fiends to be lazy and skip punctuation," writes El Khoury. She continues: Pundits will say that it's just an extra tap to add a period (double-tap the space bar) or a comma (switch to the characters layout and tap comma), but it's one extra tap too many. When you're firing off replies and messages at a rapid rate, the jarring pause while the keyboard switches to symbols and then switches back to letters is just too annoying, especially if you're doing it multiple times in one message. I hate pausing mid-sentence so much that I will sacrifice a comma at the altar of speed. [...]
The real problem, at the end of the day, is that iPhones -- not Android phones -- are popular among Gen Z buyers, especially in the US -- a market with a huge online presence and influence. Add that most smartphone users tend to stick to default apps on their phones, so most of them end up with the default iPhone keyboard instead of looking at better (albeit often even slower) alternatives. And it's that same keyboard that's encouraging them to be lazy instead of making it easier to add punctuation.
So yes, I blame the iPhone for killing the period and slaughtering the comma, and I think both of those are great offenders in the death of the capital letter. But trends are cyclical, and if the cassette player can make a comeback, so can the comma. Who knows, maybe in a year or two, writing like a five-year-old will be passe, too, and it'll be trendy to use proper grammar again.
The real problem, at the end of the day, is that iPhones -- not Android phones -- are popular among Gen Z buyers, especially in the US -- a market with a huge online presence and influence. Add that most smartphone users tend to stick to default apps on their phones, so most of them end up with the default iPhone keyboard instead of looking at better (albeit often even slower) alternatives. And it's that same keyboard that's encouraging them to be lazy instead of making it easier to add punctuation.
So yes, I blame the iPhone for killing the period and slaughtering the comma, and I think both of those are great offenders in the death of the capital letter. But trends are cyclical, and if the cassette player can make a comeback, so can the comma. Who knows, maybe in a year or two, writing like a five-year-old will be passe, too, and it'll be trendy to use proper grammar again.
your really think so (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:your really think so (Score:5, Funny)
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Huh. I didn't realize this is why iFans don't punctuate anything. Well at least they have smart quotes, I guess?
Re:your really think so (Score:5, Funny)
Apple users don't always use punctuation, but when they do, they prefer to break non-Unicode-aware websites.
Re: your really think so (Score:5, Interesting)
Now I understand why
My Apple user friends
They use Enter
Or Send
Where they could be using punctuation
For some of them
I've removed notifications
Because of the salvo of messages they send when chatting
Finally
Now I understand
Re: your really think so (Score:4, Funny)
Re: your really think so (Score:2)
There, fixed it for you.
Punctuation isnâ(TM)t the only set of characters that /. can't render (see what I did there?)
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Apple users don't always use punctuation, but when they do, they prefer to break non-Unicode-aware websites.
This statement needs a little polishing, and also the picture of the older guy with the Mexican beer is missing here.
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Mod parent Funny, but the story has a lot of potential.
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Wait till you get a load of what microsoft does!
(Word is the origin of 'smart quotes', and yes bloody wordpad does it to, never edit code in the damn thing)
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4/10 .. not enough grammatical errors and incorrect word substitutions, could have made it funnier
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you got away with that because nowhere did you need an OXFORD COMMA
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Listen, guys:
You don’t have to let tech take over your life, and it doesn’t have to dictate how you do everything. I guarantee you that if you don’t know how to write properly, you won’t make it in many professions—or, for that matter, make it out of school to get a degree to work in those professions: lawyer, teacher, scientist, or anything you might need an MBA for.
But what do I know? I think autocorrect is a bigger menace than any so-called “stupid” punctuation r
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Japanese students and young adults have lost the ability to write kanji characters because they’re now used to just punching in phonetics
Well when the tests and homework are online, yeah. You don't get much practice writing it, unless you put in the effort yourself. That's true of any language. Something I pointed out to my professor and they just shrugged it off.
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I think autocorrect is a bigger menace
Indeed. Autocorrect is forever changing "its" to "it's" for me.
Did you hear the creator of it died? I didn't even know he was I'll.
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i read that many japanese students and young adults have lost the ability to writ kanji characters because they are now used to just punching in phonetics on their phones
If this is actually happening at scale, Japanese culture is in serious trouble. Because the spoken language has a limited number of sounds, almost like Hawaiian, kanji are critical for carrying the meaning of words. It's why Japan took the trouble of importing Chinese characters hundreds of years ago to supplement the original phonetic alphabet.
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Good example.
It doesn't really bother me if it's a one liner (or thereabouts), but anything longer really needs punctuation, capitalization, and paragraphs.
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The actual culprit (Score:5, Insightful)
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We failed to inculcate a respect for the value of the written word. You reap what you sow.
You think people actually taking the time to write messages isn't having enough respect? Wait until you chat with someone who always only send voice messages over WhatsApp, that will show you what disrespect is.
Automatic transcription of voice messages is one thing sorely lacking in WA. At least I can play the voice at 2x speed, that made it barely tolerable. Before that feature, I generally ignore all voice messages. A 30 second voice message could be read in 2-5 seconds if texted, if it isn't worth yo
Re: The actual culprit (Score:3)
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WhatsApp is what the world uses to communicate.
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The world can communicate just fine without having to send anything through any platform owned by Mark Zuckerberg.
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They could, but don't. The places I've gone frequently (manly Latin America and India) all use WhatsApp extensively, to the point that businesses do not have usable telephone numbers, just a number that is used only for WhatsApp. You can refuse to use it, but you're going to find it difficult to contact a massive portion of people, in India, active users of WhatsApp make up over 75% of all internet users, in Mexico it's over 90%.
WhatsApp works over WiFi on a phone that has no service if you don't have servi
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That's on you for not telling them you refuse to use whatsapp.
Most people aren't going to bend to the whims of tech nerds. I can tell the various local groups I'm as smugly as I like that I refuse to use whatsapp, and the result will be that I'm not in the local groups.
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We failed to inculcate a respect for the value of the written word. You reap what you sow.
Yes, life was so much better back when more people couldn't read or write.
Computers have aided literacy immeasurably by putting the implements to do so in the hands of many. Not just in the developed world, but the developing world as well.
As for the value of the written word... you know there is no central authority for the English Language... There's a good reason for this, language is not defined by haughty pedants in ivory towers upset that everyone is not speaking the exact way they were taught 2
Re:The actual culprit (Score:5, Insightful)
The ultimate arbiter of language is common usage. What that is depends on how things become common. Usually it's from how we're taught, how written and broadcast sources use the language (such as books and media), and finally how we communicate with each other.
But there are still right and wrong things in language. If you go wild, creating your own neologisms, aberrant spellings, or misused phrases just because you think they're right, you're not some grand innovator. You're just a stubborn idiot. You don't spell "definitely" with an "a", you don't say "begs the question" when you mean "raises the question", and for the love of FSM, "it's" is a contraction of "it is", not a possessive pronoun.
That said, English does have problems, mainly self-inflicted. I think many of them might be due to English-speakers' tendency to borrow from other languages, thereby adopting many inconsistencies in spelling and pronunciation. For a hilarious take on that, see this famous poem. [chateauview.com]
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Indeed: begging is more emphatic than raising. Of course, only a "stubborn idiot" would use "begs the question" when they mean "assumes the desired conclusion", because bad English translations of bad Latin translations of Greek are obviously bad.
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Very simply NO IT IS NOT. The ultimate arbiter of language is NOT common usage. The REAL arbiter in the US is the Chicago Guide to Style, a book that you have probably never heard of, otherwise you would not have embarrassed yourself with your comment. Language would be a chaotic mess if there were no standard.
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No, it's Strunk & White + APA you fool.
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The ultimate arbiter of language is common usage. What that is depends on how things become common. Usually it's from how we're taught, how written and broadcast sources use the language (such as books and media), and finally how we communicate with each other.
But there are still right and wrong things in language. If you go wild, creating your own neologisms, aberrant spellings, or misused phrases just because you think they're right, you're not some grand innovator. You're just a stubborn idiot. You don't
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Sorry for the double-post. Slashdot was doing strange things and I didn't see the other copy before posting this one.
Yeah but then you have to teach the humanities (Score:2)
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/facepalm
It's not humanities, it's soft skills. It includes things like typing, being able to carry a conversation, having a good work ethic, managing your time, being able to problem solve, maintain hygiene, etc. People who lack them tend to do poorly in the job market. You should try to learn at least a few of these skills in addition to a hard skill that's actually marketable. Posting communist propaganda to slashdot and reddit all day is neither a hard skill nor is it marketable.
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We failed to inculcate a respect for the value of the written word. You reap what you sow.
No. The value of written word hasn't been respected since the age of kings. Commoners and working classes never had respect for the value of written word but the actual abuse of it is something very recent.
Greetings from a man who was actively not taught proper English at school (due to stupid government policy back in the day; I leant a lot of proper English when I learnt another language), but who still is able to use a period.
Bad software design screws things (Score:5, Insightful)
and has done for a long time. One of the worst (IMHO and I know that many will disagree with me) was many years ago when a Microsoft mail program put the cursor on the first line of a reply rather than the bottom - as had been done until then. The result of this is that Top Posting [idallen.com] became popular rather than Bottom or Interleaved posting.
The result is:
* poor flow - where you have replies before questions
* that many only read the first few lines in email, so points in a long/complex email are ignored
* that most people do not trim old text from emails - so they get ever longer
As I said, many will not agree with me; there is a lot more that people do badly in emails - like not writing clearly.
Maybe change the rules a little (Score:5, Informative)
On the iPhone keyboard, a quick double tap produces a period. A slightly slower double tap just makes two spaces. That's my personal shorthand for a comma. The list of people I text extensively with is a fairly short one, and they all know my hack for this problem. Others quickly figure it out. Just like a comma the extra space lets the reader know where a pause belongs. Mostly it doesn't make a big difference and may not even be noticed. If the sentence is complicated or hastily written though it lets the reader go back and sort things out easily.
I wouldn't go around recommending it as a solution but it works for me.
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On the iPhone keyboard, a quick double tap produces a period.
How do you put in a quotation mark? Do a fucking handstand? #thinkdifferent
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This is the most Apple response I've ever seen. Our designers thought the comma and period looked a bit "icky", so you need to use a new, more complex and obscure method of conveying the same information without using the standard that has been in place for hundreds of years that everyone understands.
Obviously, there will be an adjustment period as your friends and family will need to adapt to you having an iPhone, which is good for them because it is clearly superior. And you will be happier not having to
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How dare you completely wreck the article author's irrational hatred of things that they feel inferior too. And the vitriol of the commentors with their YEAH APPLE SUCKS diatribes based on nothing factual. It's so tiring.
One can only hope. (Score:5, Insightful)
Please, too, stop using "literally" for emphasis, that's not what it means. And "begs the question" doesn't make you sound literate if you're not talking about the logical fallacy.
Re:One can only hope. (Score:5, Insightful)
The logical fallacy meaning of "begs the question" is essentially obsolete. English isn't Latin, it's not a dead language, and "begs the question" is now synonymous with "raises the question".
The use of "literally" to mean "figuratively" still bugs me, but I suspect we're going to have to live with it, it's part of the language now.
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It's still wrong to say "begs the question" when you mean "raises the question". Begging the question is a circular logical fallacy, where you smuggle your conclusion into a premise.
When someone says "begs the question" when they mean "raises the question" I can tell what they really mean. But I can also tell they're an idiot.
Re: One can only hope. (Score:2)
Meh, no. (Score:2)
Sure. But that's not the phrase. The phrase is "raises the question."
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Re:One can only hope. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not "obsolete", because that implies that it was once correct and it never was. to en archei aiteisthai (I'm not going to escape the Greek letters to work around /.'s limitations) should have been translated "postulating the starting point" or glossed (as Burnet did in 1680) "asserting the thing in question". It only became "begging the question" because of translators who reasoned, "This word translates as that word in some contexts, so therefore it translates as that word in all contexts". It's of a level of the machine translation of yesteryear which turns "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" into "The vodka is good but the meat is mouldy".
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So you would obviously argue that punctuation can also die, as described in the article. It's surprising you're still using it.
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The use of "literally" to mean "figuratively" still bugs me, but I suspect we're going to have to live with it, it's part of the language now.
And then there's the complete misunderstanding of the apostrophe:
Re: One can only hope. (Score:2)
Apostrophes are used to pluralize letters, like the P's and Q's.
Apostrophes are also used to form possessives, like Dave's.
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t'll be trendy to use proper grammar again
Seeing how generations misuse "get" like it's "smurf", I doubt proper grammar wil ever return.
Literary editors don't even bother correcting it, no matter how popular the author is.
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Re: One can only hope. (Score:2)
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Please, too, stop using "literally" for emphasis, that's not what it means.
It can literally mean that [merriam-webster.com]. Words' meanings change over time. This is literally an example.
Dumbing down of users (Score:5, Insightful)
I may be wrong but it seems like we have younger generations coming thru who think a phone and/or tablet is enough for any computing task and basically have a minimal understanding of PCs and wider computing.
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The "ask a young person" advice was never valid.
In any age group, there are people who find computing interesting and learn about it. From a 90 year old retired CS professor to a 12 year old kid, that interest exists. But it's never been a majority of people, no matter how old they are. A young person today probably knows how to use the ticktocks, but doesn't understand the concepts behind the screen. A person who is my age probably played Oregon Trail and didn't hit return when the cursor got to the en
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To be clear, if you were born before the early 1960s you would have had to actively learn about computers. Those born from the 1960s onward, until recently, grew up around computers so were likely to learn about them from just being around them at a
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I think there is some validity in it, because young children tend to be less risk-averse. They will try stuff until they find something that works rather than refusing to touch the device in case they break it.
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Using an iPhone or Android phone doesn't teach you much about computers
Define this. What do you mean "teach you much about computers"? The goal is not to understand a tool, it's to understand how the tool can be used. Some of the people who most actively use their computers for objectively necessary tasks do so without using them.
You don't need to know how an engine works, or how to change the oil to drive a car. The early days of understanding a computer were the result of the device being designed poorly with only experts and nerds in mind. We are absolutely in a better plac
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if you need help using a computer the common advise was to ask a young person.
Oh, the irony! A thread about grammar where you use a verb as a noun.
I'll let you figure it out on your own...
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There was a time when if you need help using a computer the common advise was to ask a young person. However I think things have gone full circle. Using an iPhone or Android phone doesn't teach you much about computers, just UXes and how to use apps. Worse still if iPhones are more popular they are less likely to even learn how to create apps as Apple is basically anti casual app creation.
This isn't in any way new with phone/tablets, because we have been saying this same thing since computers stopped shipping with BASIC interpreters, kids stopped learning assembler, since Visual Basic was cancelled, and so on. Hell, we all knew it was even going to happen to Linux once a desktop environment wasn't a total bitch to get working, why mess with the guts of your OS if it's already working fine. It's not a lack of development tools keeping kids from opening an IDE, it's the why mess with it if it'
Iphones (Score:2)
You guys. There's a common thread here... (Score:2)
Have you considered that your experience might not be universal...?
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Wait what? There's a world outside of iPhone?
"Forgetfulness" (Score:2)
Ron Thule's voice was a whisper from the darkness. "I come from a far world... I am a savage, a rising race that has not learned the secret of fire, nor bow, nor hammer. Tell me Shor Nun, what is the nature of the two dry sticks I must rub, that fire may be born?...Tell me how I may make fire."
"Why---with matches or a heat ra--- No, Ron Thule. Vague thoughts, meaningless ideas and unclear. I---I have forgotten the ten thousand generations of development. I cannot retreat to a level you, savage of an untrain
No (Score:2)
Let's test that further insult to readers, shall we?:
theproblemismostpeoplearejustuneducated orlazyhavingtoreadcommentswherepeople cantbebothertousepunctuationorcaseisone stepremovedfromnotusingspacesletstest thatfurtherinsultofreadersshallwe (/. disallowed a long string without any spaces)
Siri is dumb (Score:5, Interesting)
After being an Android user for decades, when I switched to the iPhone I was surprised how poorly the keyboard compared. In particular, Android is much better at giving me the correct keyboard: the phone-number one when I am to enter something like a PIN, and the email one (with "@" and even a ".com" key). I expected iPhone to be smarter than Android about that, but Apple is much worse.
This mirrors my experience with Siri. When that first came out, I had been on Android forever. My friends with their fancy iPhone (was it 4s?) were showing me this amazing Siri. My response was: My Android phone has been doing a digital voice assistant for at least a year? Apple is just now getting that?
And I've found that Siri is pretty useless and dumber than even Alexa. (Hey Google has always been the smartest one.) If I Siri, "What time is it?" I get the Wikipedia entry for 'what is time". If I ask Alexa for the weather, I get a nice little weather report. All that Siri is able to do is say one sentence: "It is 69 degrees." Also when Siri answers only in text (for some reason, she often will not speak), the answer pops up for about 6 seconds --- way too fast for me to read -- and then irretrievably disappears. I get a lot more functionality (weather, alarm clock, information about "who sang that?", general info, and "stop!" from Alexa than I do from Siri.) Fucking Alexa works better than Siri !?!? I continue to be shocked at how bad Apple's phone is.
I switched to iPhone because I have a Mac and now an iPad, and it was the same price as another Android would have been. I really expected a better experience. At least my Contacts, Music, and Photos are slightly easier to maintain across devices than before. I have an iPhone 13 Pro Max, and later this year may consider upgrading. Maybe when hook an LLM to Siri, it will be more useful?
I wonder what the impact of LLMs that have voices will be on people, when it starts hallucinating. Will it defeat their notion that the thing is "intelligent", or enhance the emotional response making people think these things are sentient?
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Re:Siri is dumb (Score:4, Funny)
To be fair, Google isn't that clever either. It basks in its own bullshit while trying to teach you how to use it. I was driving my car the other day and said
Me: "Hey Google switch to Spotify" - Me asking it normally to stop playing the radio and resume my recent Spotify playlist, which usually works perfectly.
Google: *beep beep* "Ok, playing music from Spotify. You can also ask for the weather by saying Hey Google! Play the current news."
Google: *beep beep* "Ok, playing the current news"
Google: *proceeds to switch back to the radio on a news channel.*.
Me: *faceplam*
They fucked up (Score:2)
"By hiding the comma and period behind a symbol switch" :)
Well ... (Score:2)
Punctuation Is Dead Because the iPhone Keyboard Killed It
The E.E. Cummings mode is (still) optional.
A contractor (Score:2)
A contractor came to fix the "Zip" tap: He used a labeling machine to stick a 2-line, 20-word how-to on the wall: All capitals, no punctuation with a line-break, mid-sentence. I literally couldn't parse it. Such 'laziness' might be because he didn't know how to use the labeling machine, or didn't want to spend the time (See: Contractor) being precise.
Rubbish (Score:2)
Absolute nonsense. If anything, the autocorrect rules try to fix this kind of thing.
It was SMS that killer grammer. (Score:3)
What? (Score:2)
> By hiding the comma and period behind a symbol switch
The biggest problem I have with the iPhone keyboard is that the period is not hidden. It's right beside the space bar, and I hit. It. All. The. Time. Trying. To. Type. A. Space. With. My. Right. Thumb.
Entire article is based on a false premise.
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No More Million Dollar Comma... (Score:2)
No more million dollar comma with no new punctuation.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/20... [abc.net.au]
I'll wait for the case of the million dollar emoji ...
And no more Victor Borge sound effects for punctuation...of course no more Victor Borge unless AI brings him back.
JoshK.
It'll just be automatically added. (Score:2)
I justice use Siri (Score:4, Informative)
I justice use Siri. The dick feature works prefecture, and never mist interprets. My grandma or puncture nation.
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collateral damage: thinking (Score:2)
My kids used that line on me. Anyone?
My colleague tells me his kids (early 20's), wouldn't know how to find their way home, or where they live irl, if they didn't have Google maps.
Wrong, schools stopped caring. (Score:2)
Can we also blame Apple for inserting (TM) whenever an Apple user tries to use an apostrophe?
It's not just punctuation! (Score:4, Insightful)
The iphone is absolutely useless for manipulating text, period.
Typing, cutting, pasting, and undoing are mere afterthoughts.
I guess Apple's 'vision' is one where users will never do such independent things.
Nothing new here, really... (Score:2)
Back in the 80's, people were often typing out messages in all-caps, because the 8-bit computers of the era didn't draw lower-case letters at all. (I had a TRS-80 Color Computer 2, for example, that knew what the ASCII values were for lower-case characters, but displayed them as all-caps characters in inverse video (black box behind the white letter).
Eventually, people started putting these machines in a graphics mode and drawing new fonts to give you the lower-case characters back. But it was a case of pe
Irony: android authority ... (Score:2)
... is now an expert about iOS / iPhone? ;-)
abandoning punctuation works fine... (Score:2)
...just as long as you have nothing to say that takes more than one sentence to fully convey. Yet another trend that limits peoples ability to express themselves
Abso-fucking-lutely. (Score:2)
Thank you for saying this. I've been an android user all my life. Had never had an iPhone until I got a work phone 2 months ago. The keyboard is completely unusable. How do people live like that? How do they tolerate it??
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was ahead of his time
You're correct, and you beat me to it. With that being said, he did write in several styles during his carreer.
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e e cummings (or as he and his wife preferred, E. E. Cummings) did not completely eschew lower-case. The idea that he did is actually a myth. [flocabulary.com]
Cummings used case and punctuation to convey an artistic message. iPhone users are just sloppy.
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I'm European and I can relate. I've seen people butcher every language. Even the Germans. THE GERMANS. The ones who have a stroke if they see someone cross a pedestrian crossing while the light is red. Even they butcher their own language.
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The only smartphone keyboards I've ever used on Android, Swype and Gboard
Fuck gboard and the horse it rode in on.
They made a shitty knockoff of Swype, but free beats paid every time, so Gboard killed swype. Seype is now dead and won't run, but as of last use a few months ago but still this year it still beats the hell out of Gboard.
GBoard has the feeling that a bunch of googlers went "we know algorithms" and copied the core algorithm of Swype and didn't bother to do any of the UX bits, because UX is for wee