Punctuation is dead because the iPhone keyboard killed it

Open any social media site today, and you’ll find a slew of tweets, shorts, messages, videos, photos, and more — almost all written with lower capital letters and barely any punctuation. For me, that phenomenon started as a fun observation many years ago, became very irritating as I noticed it more and more, and eventually settled into an unavoidable reality.

People these days don’t use punctuation like they should, despite how much this can irk sticklers for grammar like me. This is especially true for the younger generations, who grew up in the mobile-first age with a smartphone in their hands before they ever saw a full physical QWERTY keyboard.

But I posit that the trend isn’t due to some teenage rebellion, coolness factor, informal texting, or lack of understanding of what the Shift or Caps Lock key can do. No, I think the real reason is a mix of laziness and smartphone use, particularly the iPhone and its terrible keyboard without accessible period or comma keys.

See, even the most grammar-fanatic user, like me, ends up dreading using punctuation when it takes extra taps to add it. I’ve noticed this so often because I always use Gboard on my Android phones, so I punctuate my sentences properly. But on the rare occasion that I dig out my test iPhone 13 to check an app or feature, I end up hating every second of my typing experience because of how tedious it is to add periods or commas to my sentences. So I start skipping them here and there — sometimes, everywhere. So much so that the auto-capitalization stops getting triggered, and I end up with very Gen Z-looking sentences with a random string of lower-cap words separated by nothing more than spaces.

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.

Of course, those of us with Android phones know that this extra pause and switch is so unnecessary, too. It’s been over a decade since Apple released the first iteration of its keyboard on iOS, and the fact that it’s still absolutely horrid to this day in iOS 18 is unforgivable. Especially when Gboard — and other Android keyboards — have proven again and again that the two extra keys for the comma and period still look perfectly good, remain perfectly usable, and add functionality instead of removing it. Apple, however, seems steadfast in its conviction that form trumps function, so the silly iOS keyboard remains a big annoyance for any grammar fiend. Plus, it’s cooler to develop Apple Intelligence than fix a keyboard, eh?

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 passé, too, and it’ll be trendy to use proper grammar again.