FULL STOPS

IN TEXTS and tweets and even emails, some people seem to think any punctuation unnecessary. Wrong. It may take you marginally less time to write, but it will almost certainly take the intended recipient marginally longer to absorb. That is why, for example, in the age of the telegram, when you paid for each word used, senders were ready to pay to include the word STOP if it helped make their message more comprehensible. In a nutshell, in contemporary written English full stops are used: 1) To mark the end of a sentence that is a complete statement: You are reading my book. Thank you. 2) To mark the end of a group of words that don’t form a conventional sentence, so as to emphasise a statement: You are reading my book. My book. Wow. Thank you. 3) In some abbreviations, for example, Jan., if a full stop comes at the end of a sentence, you don’t need to add another full stop.