Trail-offs and punctuation...

Do you ever think about punctuation in IM conversations? No? Yes?

Either way, I think I made the mistake of doing just that. The thing is, when you are talking to someone over MSN or whatnot, unless you are using a webcam, it is a bit difficult to read facial expressions or body language. You can't necessarily determine the other person's mood, except when he/she is saying it directly. Of course, as in any normal conversation when someone has been asked if they are feeling alright, they might not give an honest answer, especially if they're extremely depressed. But from what I've seen so far it's sometimes possible to read someone's mood from the way they write. In a world of communication where long strings of non-capital letters and lacking punctuation are pretty common phenomeons, every full stop, comma or capital letter can be used as a weapon.

People who would normally skip the capital letters altogether will suddenly put one in the beginning of their IMs and start finishing each sentence with a full stop.
What could have been a casual greeting from one person to another, a " hey :-) ", suddenly turns into a passive-aggressive "Hi." Maybe this is just my weird, overanalyzing mind, but the full-stop in such a short message is almost like a landmine. It makes me tread carefully when I respond; in fact it almost discourages response, effectively killing the flow of conversation before it has even begun.
Some people can read a person's personality from their handwriting. I believe it's possible to an extent - not to the same extent as with handwriting - to tell something about a person judging by their sentence structure and choice of punctuation in IM conversations. This is only a theory, however, and its exploration would probably require elaborate studies. It wouldn't surprise me if someone else had already made such. You can sometimes tell if an individual (like me) is a grammar fetishist. Of course, some people who really are grammar fetishists use MSN as a place where it's okay to just relax and not be too serious about the formal aspects of writing. Some would choose to view lacking capitalization as a sign of sloppiness, while others would interpret it as a sign of a healthy, laid-back person.
In addition to this we have smileys, abbreviation fillers and trail-offs...
The trail-off is a phenomenon which, I think, has simply become a habit to many of us, a trail-off being a series of dots (often three) to follow a sentence. Like a lot of smileys, the trail-off is highly context sensitive, i.e. "We could watch a movie tonight..." where it makes the sentence just hang in the air as a suggestion. Though what I think is that the trail-off often tends to make a sentence seem like the writer is out of breath. "I'm doing fine..." feels like it's leaving out a major "...but..."
It's an uncertain or half-hearted sentence. "That's definitely a possibility..." as opposed to "that's definitely a possibility :-)"
I mentioned abbreviation fillers, examples of which are "lol" and "rofl". Their overutilization in games like World of Warcraft and other places of the web might generate the prejudice that people who use them all the time are retards. They work well on occasion when used appropriately, but if they're used all the time it just feels like the person in question has nothing else to say. And then again there are some people who feel that smileys should be obliterated forever.

I'm sure a lot of people have thought about all this before, this was just my personal rant about a highly subjective topic.