Emoticons

With the development of technologies, communications have become less face to face, removing an important aspect of communication--the nonverbal aspect.  This means that, ordinarily, one can have a better understanding of the context of a message with one can see the bodily expressions or vocal inflections of whom you are talking with.  By this, one can tell if somebody is being sarcastic or is joking by the expression on his or her face.  This element, however, does not exist when you are communicating via e-mail.  This means that things that may have been taken lightly in person can be taken literally over e-mail and really hurting someone's feelings.  Emoticons have developed to help deal with this problem.  They exist to indicate emotions or expressions to help readers better understand the context of what they are reading.

Emoticons, as you can see are little "pictures" made from the various characters available at the keyboard.  A smiley, a simple emoticon, can be made by simply typing a colon, dash, and right parenthesis ":-)".  These emoticons can be quite helpful in keeping informal e-mail bright and cheery and being correctly interpreted.  However, these emoticons usually should be confined to informal communications.

Some Basic Examples:

• :-)  Your basic smiley.  This smiley is used to inflect a sarcastic or joking statement since people can not hear vocal inflections over e-mail.
• (-:  User is left handed.
• ;-)  Winky smiley.  Somebody has just made a flirtatious and/or sarcastic remark.  It is more of a "don't hit me for what I just said" smiley.
• :-(  Frowning smiley. User did not like that last statement or is upset or depressed about something.

More Examples:

EFF's Basic Smiley Dictionary

Wellness Center:  The Smiley File

Guide To Smilies

Created on March 7th, 2001.
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