If you are one of those people whose text messages always end with a full stop, then you are officially less sincere than the abbreviated text message senders, and are bordering on heartless.

Official research by Binghamton University found text messages including an exclamation mark, for example, “lol!” or smiley faced emoticons or ‘k’ rather than ‘okay’ are deemed more considerate and profound.

Research leader, Celia Klin, said, “Texting is lacking many of the social cues used in actual face-to-face conversations.

“When speaking, people easily convey social and emotional information with eye gaze, facial expressions, tone of voice, pauses and so on. People obviously can’t use these mechanisms when they are texting.

“Thus, it makes sense that texters rely on what they have available to them – emoticons, deliberate misspellings that mimic speech sounds and, according to our data, punctuation.”

Aisha Seedat, 17-year -old student at Cardinal Newman College said, “Yeah it is really strange when people use full conversation in a text message.

"The only people I know who do that are in their 40s.

“Full sentences with all the words spelt correctly and no abbreviations just seems really abrupt and you’d only use it if you’re being really formal.”

Momtaz Karim, mother of three is an advocate of full sentence text messages.

“I feel I am constantly translating text messages from my children.

“How difficult is it to write a full word rather than replacing it with one letter? We have predictive text for goodness sakes!

“And I can’t abide people who put an ‘x’ at the end of their messages.

"We don’t end conversations with a kiss, so why do that in a text?

“I realise by saying this, I am going to sound like a complete weirdo!

“But those emoticons are the worst part of technological advance!”

Not sure if the rule applies for those who decide to text in Urdu?