The use of the full stop seems to be declining among younger people, especially when it comes to text messages.
Some claim a full stop in a text message or e-mail can be perceived as blunt or unfriendly.
Research from Binghamton University in New York has found that emoticons, irregular spellings and exclamation points in text messages are not sloppy - but that these 'textisms' help convey meaning and intent in the absence of spoken conversation.
Binghamton University Professor of Psychology, Celia Klin, said: "In contrast with face-to-face conversation, texters can't rely on extra-linguistic cues such as tone of voice and pauses, or non-linguistic cues such as facial expressions and hand gestures.
"In a spoken conversation, the cues aren't simply add-ons to our words; they convey critical information.
"A facial expression or a rise in the pitch of our voices can entirely change the meaning of our words."
A 2016 study led by Klin also found that text messages that end with a full stop are seen as less sincere than text messages that do not end with one.
Catherine Ann Cullen is a writer and Poet in Residence with Poetry Ireland.
She told The Hard Shoulder: "I had noticed a trend - of course, I think anybody who works with younger people know that they don't use punctuation in quite the way that we might have been taught to at school, in such a regimented way.
"And obviously when they send a text they tend to dispense with punctuation altogether sometimes.
"But I hadn't actually realised the reason for that - but I have to marvel at the evolution of usage of language all the time, it doesn't stand still."
"I hadn't actually realised that the full stop was such a point of contention, should we say, among younger people.
"I was having lunch with my 13-year-old niece and my 15-year-old daughter.
"When I brought up the question with them, after I had a call from your programme, I was astonished that they were completely in agreement with the idea.
"My niece Jane said she was with a friend recently who sent to a text to her mother and she accidentally ended it with a fulls top.
"And then she said: 'Oh no, now my mam is going to think I'm annoyed with her'.
"I was surprised to hear that this was a thing, and then my daughter Stella - who's 15 - she agreed that full stops are not usually acceptable in ordinary texts.
"She said she only uses them if she's having an argument with somebody by text, and normally she breaks up her texts by sending a short series of texts without full stops rather than one long one that would need full stops in it.
"And she said she tends to use maybe an exclamation mark or a question mark at the end, or emojis, rather than full stops.
"She did a quick poll of her friends, a quick ring-around, and they all agreed: they find full stops very blunt and formal at the end of a text."
She explained: "Perhaps for young people, texts mimic speech rather than mimicking written language.
"So we're maybe the generation who would have written letters and long e-mails, they're the generation who write and communicate in short text messages and on Instagram and things like that.
"They tend to write in very short, condensed little phrases - but also they're trying to mimic speech.
"Sometimes they're trying to mimic a conversation that you're having face to face, so they're maybe using emojis, facial expressions, they're using phonetic spellings to reflect what speech sounds like rather than what it's written like.
"I also wondered if it's something to do with when we adults say things like 'End of story' or 'Full stop', it's quite authoritarian and maybe they're taking that onboard and they're thinking that's very blunt and sharp".
