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100% GOOD (3 votes)AnsweredLanguage Question
How can you end an online chat conversation?

What can you say at the end of an online chat conversation. Can you say “see you later” or “talk to you later” or “ write to you later” ? 😊

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AussieInBg profile picture AussieInBgJuly 2022
All can work.

Now, which one you might use depends on context.

If you have never communicated with someone except by text-formatted messages, then all are possible. ”Write to you later” implies that your response is going to be longer. You could also use ”I’ll message you later (on)”

If you have previously spoken by voice or video with someone, then you have to be careful with what you use. ”see you later” would imply ”our next communication should be by video”, ”talk to you later” would be by voice and ”write to you later”/”I’ll message you later on” would be the next communication being in text format.

There are many other possibilities for ending a chat conversation, but I’ve already written a lot.

Write to you later


  • AussieInBg profile picture AussieInBgJuly 2022
    HI Vincent and no worries!

    Actually, ”see you later” is still definitely correct for text chatting when you haven’t seen or heard the person before (at least from my experience chatting with other native English speakers).

    Originally, ”see you later” was something like a less formal way of saying ”until we meet again”. Nowadays, that meeting could be in-person, over the phone or, as now on internet, via text.

    The response ”yes, hopefully we can see each other”, I suspect, can be paraphrased in your context as ”yes, hopefully we will meet online and communicate with each other again” - which would be the response from someone who is not quite sure that they would be meeting you again to chat online via text.

    So, it’s far more likely correct than not.

    Just remember here that ”see” has become highly idiomatic and doesn’t have the meaning of directly visually observing the person’s face in communication

    When idiom might be confused with a different literal meaning, then we avoid using the idiom - so if we have chatted before by video, we would use something else rather than ”see you soon” if we want to continue the conversation by using text.

  • vincent profile picture vincentJuly 2022
    Hi Aussie, thanks for the reply. It’s very clear. in fact I used to always end a conversation whether face to face or in text chat with ”See you later”. So I see that is not correct. I realized this when I said ”see you later” to someone during a text chat conversation, and they replied ”yes, hopefully we can see each other”.