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Emoti-whats?!

Ever instant message with the smiley happy work mate? You know the type: they end every sentence with some sort of smiley face or other picture. They seem to have all the short-cut keys memorized. Maybe they have assigned hot keys so they can quickly drop a quick smiley-heart-heart combo.

 Who knows.

 While you are going to find a few folks on occasion that don’t demonstrate emoticon tact, the fact remains that emoticons go a long way in helping communicate tone and emotion. The trick is to know when and how much.

Bringing balance

Too many emoticons can be distracting or down right annoying. Use emoticons with great care. Here’s a quick question to ask yourself: does the reader likely already know how you are saying what you are saying?

 Here are some examples of sentences that DO NOT need emoticons to convey emotions:

“That is hilarious!!”
 “LOL”
 “I can’t wait to get out of here!”
 “I’m starving!”
 “Can we vote Bob off the island?”

 The fact is that the punctuation mark at the end of the sentence acts as an emoticon of sorts. Is your sentence incomplete or is your tone unclear without the emoticon? If you’re unsure, then you are probably safe to drop an emoticon. On the other hand, if you look at your last few instant message conversations and you see lots of emoticons, think about cutting back.

 Then again, if you have hot keys programmed for emoticons, definitely cut back!

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