How many times do you hit “send” when you’re telling someone a story over text? Do you type the whole thing out in one message, complete with sentences and maybe even punctuation? Or does the story arrive like this?
wait
so I have to tell you something
because this is insane
lol
Your answer, according to the latest generational debate on TikTok, might reveal your age.
In a since-deleted TikTok video, a Gen Z user explained that she recently discovered her millennial coworkers were annoyed by the way she texts.
“I was sat with my millennial coworkers, and they were annoyed by the fact that when I text, I go, like, dah dah dah dah dah,” she explained, mimicking the rhythm of sending several messages in quick succession. Instead of putting an entire thought into one message, she sends each sentence — sometimes each thought — separately. Her millennial coworkers, meanwhile, send “one big chunk.”
“And I hate it when it’s a big chunk because it takes me so long to read it,” she said. “That’s not how my thought process works.”
Naturally, millennials took this extremely well. In screen-recorded stitches on the app, they pointed out that these “big chunks” have another name: paragraphs. Others complained about watching their phone light up again and again as someone sends six messages that could have been one. And some latched onto the creator’s theory for the generational divide: Millennials learned to text when cell phone carriers charged by the message, so they learned to cram as much information as possible into a single text.
There is some truth to the ancient millennial lore. Before unlimited texting became commonplace, wireless customers could pay for individual messages, and SMS messages have historically been counted in 160-character units. Even today, AT&T’s terms note that on plans without unlimited messaging, messages exceeding 160 characters can be counted as multiple texts.
But as a millennial who also routinely sends texts like:
omg
did you see this
I’m crying
lol
I think my fellow millennials are being a little too harsh. Because the more interesting difference here isn’t whether Gen Z knows what a paragraph is. It’s what different generations think a text message is supposed to represent.
For a lot of millennials, a text bubble is still a container. You formulate a thought, type it out, and hit send. Maybe it’s one sentence. Maybe it’s three. But the message itself is a complete unit.
The Gen Z style described in the TikTok treats texting more like a live transcript of a conversation. The send button isn’t the end of the message so much as a form of punctuation.
wait
send.
I just realized something
send.
actually nvm lol
send.
Read together, those aren’t necessarily three separate messages. They’re one conversational turn, broken into beats.
And this isn’t entirely anecdotal. Gen Z’s preference for breaking thoughts into separate messages has been observed before. In 2022, The Washington Post reported on generational differences in workplace communication and noted that younger workers were more likely to split thoughts and questions across multiple messages rather than putting several ideas into a single block of text.
There’s even some evidence that people don’t necessarily like the rapid-fire approach. One experiment involving 805 participants compared reactions to a hypothetical coworker who sent one paragraph with reactions to the same coworker sending several back-to-back messages. Participants rated the rapid-fire texter less favorably, and, interestingly, that effect was strongest among younger participants, complicating the idea that this is a clean Gen Z-versus-millennial divide.
Context matters, too. A Slack message from your coworker is not the same thing as a chaotic group chat at 11 p.m. And even the most paragraph-loving millennial probably isn’t carefully composing a thesis statement, supporting evidence, and conclusion when their best friend sends them a screenshot of their ex’s Instagram Story.
The closer the relationship and the more active the conversation, the more texting can resemble speech.
Even the smallest choices can change how a message is read. A 2025 study of 200 undergraduates found that short text messages ending in a period were perceived more negatively than the same messages without one. That effect disappeared with longer messages, suggesting that punctuation over text can convey emotional information beyond its grammatical function.
Over the past two decades, texting and social media haven’t simply shortened the things we say. They’ve developed ways of communicating rhythm, tone, hesitation, emphasis, and reaction without hearing someone’s voice.
Take “lol.”
“LOL” ostensibly means “laughing out loud,” but nobody has actually needed to laugh out loud to type “lol” for a very long time. Linguists have studied how “lol” functions as a discourse marker: It can soften a statement, signal engagement, mitigate awkwardness, or simply tell the other person how to interpret the sentence around it. One analysis of text conversations found people using “lol” to signal laughter, defuse uncomfortable situations, and essentially communicate “I hear you.”
Sometimes “lol” doesn’t even need a sentence around it.
lol
That’s a complete response. You know exactly what it means.
The same thing has happened with “wait,” “HELP,” “oh,” “well,” “???” and any number of other fragments that would make your high school English teacher reach for a red pen. They’re not necessarily failed sentences. In a text conversation, they’re beats.
Social media has only accelerated that style of communication. Twitter trained users to package thoughts within a character limit. TikTok comments reward quick reactions. Group chats move fast enough that by the time you’ve finished composing your carefully structured paragraph, the conversation may have moved on to an entirely different topic.
There is a larger conversation happening about literacy among young people. The average reading score for U.S. 12th-graders fell three points between 2019 and 2024 and was 10 points below the first assessment in 1992, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
But blaming the Gen Z text barrage on declining literacy would be a leap the evidence doesn’t support. Researchers have been pushing back against the idea that internet language represents linguistic decay since millennials themselves were the teenagers supposedly destroying English with AIM. A 2008 study examining more than a million words of teenagers’ instant messages found that IM language remained firmly rooted in existing language rather than representing its collapse. More recent work has similarly examined things like “lol,” “lmao,” and emoji as tools people use to reproduce some of the tone, expression, and social cues that disappear when conversation moves onto a screen.
In other words, Gen Z didn’t invent supposedly terrible texting. They inherited it from us and developed their own dialect. Which is what makes the millennial outrage over the TikTok so funny. Millennials were once the generation being accused of butchering the English language with “lol,” “brb,” unnecessary ellipses, lowercase letters, and away messages containing Fall Out Boy lyrics.
In 2003, a 13-year-old girl in Scotland reportedly submitted a school essay written entirely in text-message shorthand. The story made international headlines and became part of a much broader panic over whether texting was destroying young people’s ability to write. As researchers David Crystal and others would go on to point out, however, many of the linguistic horrors blamed on texting weren’t particularly new, and evidence that texting was causing a collapse in literacy was lacking.
Sound familiar?
Two decades ago, millennials were the teenagers supposedly mangling English by communicating in fragments and abbreviations. Now, some of us are in the TikTok comments defending the sanctity of the paragraph.
But the technology changed, and our language changed with it. Texting has become less like sending someone a tiny letter and more like having an ongoing conversation, one in which a period can convey a mood, “lol” can be a complete response, and hitting send can create a beat in the conversation just as effectively as punctuation can.
The real generational divide isn’t whether you can read a paragraph. It’s whether you think the person on the other side of the screen is reading something you wrote or listening to you talk. For millennials, texting grew out of writing. For Gen Z, texting increasingly looks like conversation.
And sometimes a conversation takes six bubbles. Sorry about the notifications.
