Coming to a full stop?

To full stop or not to full stop? 

I'm riffing off one of Cultural Snow's (always excellent) blog posts here. In About punctuation marks and masks I learned that younger people consider a full stop at the end of a text message to be 'aggressive'. I just checked Wikipedia's entry on it and it's definitely 'a thing'. 

I am of a generation (and inclination) that still texts in full sentences with mostly correct spelling and appropriate punctuation. Admittedly I overuse the exclamation mark to the point where the full stop doesn't get much of a look in, and emojis feature heavily... which are safe enough, surely? 🍑🍆

But if, as you can see in my beautifully hand-crafted visualisation above, when you zoom in on a full stop it has a tiny little angry face, I’d better desist. Not that I text many young people. 

But what if there are other things I don't know? What if two question marks is a sexual invitation? What if brackets imply homophobia or an ellipses makes me a stalker... 

Help! I need to know these things.. please advise

Proof, if proof be needed

So one of the important things to do when putting a collection together, or presumably any publication, is to proof it carefully.

If you're anything like me (prone to a lack of attention to detail, and very easily distra.... oh look, a sparrow!) you might want this to be somebody other than you. If you're lucky you could send your work to someone like David Bateman* for a quick comment on the generality of it and get back 3 pages of typos, spellos, syntactical errors and punctuational faux pas.

I just thought I'd share a couple of the things he picked up on in the first version of The Silence Museum:

untidy bottom of “previously published” paragraph

two different styles of ellipsis on same line

inconsistent capitalization of line-starts

'a lone parenthetic comma'    and    'rogue hyphens'

"For “Flambe” the “é” you need is in the Insert menu.(“Menu”! I made a funny! Ha ha ha ha etc.)"

"Almost unbelievably, this line definitely needs another comma.  Insert it bravely!"

I thought it would be nice to thank him in the front of the book. 'Thanks to David Bateman, who taught me everything I know about ellipses'**  Then I decided to include an additional short poem about him in the collection, but I didn't send it for re-checking because it really was very short, and mentions how he taught me everything I know about ellipses. You know what's coming here, don't you? I spelled ellipses with just one 'l'.

Dho!... I mean Doh!

What's the worst typo or similar you've missed until it was too late?

* David Bateman is an excellent 'silly and serious at the same time' poet, by the way. There's not much of his stuff on the web, but check out the link for his classic 'World's Greatest Impressionist' poem

** There's only ever three dots in an ellipsis