Happy Face and Sad Face Is Not Just For The Theatre

eMoticonizer — By Shopping Blogs on March 12, 2010 8:29 am

For as long as people have roamed the earth, body language has played one of the most important roles in communication. From the gestures in the twitching eyebrows of hunter gatherers lying in wait for their prey to the bright, doe-eyes of a young girl looking across the room at her beau to the glare of a mother’s eye as she looks at her toddler stealing a cookie off the counter, all of these communications stem from a strong look of the eye or intense body language.

How do email, text messaging, instant messaging and the many online social media networks compensate for the lack of visual, body language communication? Well the answer lies in a creative use of punctuation marks and often small graphics call emoticons.

Emoticons are commonly seen as happy, sad, silly faces and more. For example, you can insert a crying emoticon into your text message to convey the sadness you feel or perhaps pout a little to tease your recipient. Most email providers allow for small graphic emoticon inserts or they may automatically format a common code into a graphic image.

Some of the most popular crying emoticon codes are colon + hyphen + opening parenthesis and also colon + apostrophe + hyphen + opening parenthesis :’-( . You can see that adding the apostrophe directly after the colon makes the emoticon appear to have a teardrop falling from its eye.

Being able to place a picture or something like a combination of symbols to convey your emotion is a perfect way to help bridge the lack of body language and physical gestures. After all, the mood and tone of written word can so often be misunderstood.

Surely, you can recall a text message or email from a coworker and when you read the message, you weren’t sure of their exact tone. Were they being sarcastic, ironic, funny, serious? If their message had contained a silly emoticon or a crying emoticon you may have been able to grasp their exact meaning more firmly.

On the other hand, you have probably been in the same room as your best friend and had a conversation on an instant message or text message marathon. Believe it or not, this most likely happens as families settle down into their living rooms and don their laptops. Inevitably, each family member will wander on to facebook or another social network and before you know it – voila – you are chatting with your sister, husband or wife across the room.

If this has ever happened to you, then you already know how silly it can get to stare each other down as you hurriedly type at each other from across the room. The same can be true as you chat your coworker from across the office or over the cubicle.

In scenarios like this, the absence of body language is really non existent because you can see the person you are chatting with. But the fun and silliness of having an emoticon/typing war can lead to a lot of laughter.

So, whether you are chatting your coworker across the hall or sending an email to your friend, use happy emoticons, silly emoticons, crying emoticons to sprinkle throughout your text so your recipient can catch your meaning.

Of course, be conservative. You don’t want every sentiment and sentence to end with a smiley face or crying emoticon because one or two, here and there, is enough to send your meaning.

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Tags: Crying Emoticons