harvyk
Senior Member
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- Apr 15, 2009
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Emoticons (I thought) were designed to add emotion, not meaning.
A good writer should be able to convey meaning without the use of emoticons. If a reader can't work out the use of humour the writer hasn't done a good job. It is the job of the writer to remove ambiguity (if they wish to) through text. If something is not funny, or could be considered inappropriate, adding a ':mrgreen:' doesn't necessarily fix the skills of the writer.
But writing skills are a broader issue.
The use of emoticons may have value where space is limited - for example text messages.
Since this is going way OT anyway, conveying true meaning inside 500 characters of internet post written in response in 30 seconds is hard. Most people don't have a strong understanding of the English language (including me, despite only ever speaking English). Since most people's communication is verbal, most of the meaning behind that communication is non-verbal (eg tone of voice, body language), as such emoticons or "codes" like "JK" are a good way of injecting a small amount of this non-verbal communication back in in a quick and easily understood manner.
The problem is that no matter how elegant you think you are in your posts, there will be people who just don't understand the meaning, won't be in on the jokes, or will take something as an insult where no insult was intended, just because the emotions behind the writing are just not present.
So as someone who loves these things ->
