Hellooooo!!! Sure, you can get the meaning across without tossing in all those extra, repetitive vowels and exclamation points, but the fact remains that quite a few of us are in the habit of typing out messages that are elongated like this. The Atlantic has taken a brief look into the practice, and perhaps unsurprisingly, it's most prevalent in modern forms of communication that limit our ability to convey nuance (think a text message, IM, or tweet). Experts say that elongating speech when writing mimics some of the intonations we use we speaking, and that it helps signal the tone of a conversation and the relationship between the people speaking with each other.