| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. |
A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. 1996.
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Page 262
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| Other conventions add keystrokes in an attempt to capture some of the nonverbal clues and body language that allow speakers in a face-to-face conversation to recognize sarcasm, facetiousness, disbelief, dismay, and other attitudes. E-mailers have an affection for punctuation that would seem unorthodox in most print communication. E-mail tends to have more exclamations than the more deliberative printed letter and consequently the exclamation point crops up frequently, often in clusters to show astonishment or disbelief. Trailing dots are a favorite too, indicating incompleteness of thought, dissatisfaction with a train of thought, or an assumption that the reader can extrapolate what is implied. To give a message special emphasis, an E-mailer may write entirely in capital letters, a device E-mailers refer to as screaming. Some of these visual conventions have emerged as a way of getting around the constraints on data transmission that now limit many networks. Underlining, for example, does not travel over some networks, so E-mailers sometimes emphasize a word or phrase by enclosing it in asterisks. | 1 |
Perhaps the most famous of all visual conventions are the “emoticons” or “smileys” that people use to summarize emotions. Here is a selection:
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Emoticon
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Emotion
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:-) |
Happy |
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:-( |
Sad |
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:-< |
Very Sad or Upset |
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:-O |
Shocked or Amazed |
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:-D |
Laughing |
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;-) |
Winking |
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:-| |
Bored or Uninterested |
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8-| |
What next! |
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8-O |
Extremely Shocked |
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:-] |
Smirk, happy sarcasm |
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:-[ |
Grimace, sad sarcasm |
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:-} |
Grinning |
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:-\ |
Undecided |
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:-# |
Sealed Lips |
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:-& |
Tongue-tied |
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:-I |
Hmmm |
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| 2 |
Reader Expectations
| | Accompanying the general tendency of E-mailers to be informal is the tendency of readers to be more forgiving than readers of printed material. Since so much E-mail is a simple substitute for a routine telephone call, its quick brief messages are mostly ephemeral—there is no point in saving them, in styling them carefully, or in being concerned with the niceties of their grammar. Where a misspelling in a printed letter leaves many readers concluding that the writer is a slob or a dunce, the same misspelling in an E-mail message | 3 |
| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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