Emoji Writing

Back in my Nokia 1100 days (best phone ever made, by the way - doubled as a brick at home!), texting had a natural expressiveness that got lost somewhere along the way. Tone in general, is hard to communicate in written language. You’d fire off a message like:

hey :) saw ur msg late :P was sleeping.. call tomo tc ciao

Every emoticon did some heavy-lifting, specially when the reader is not cognitively present enough to comprehend it. It told the reader how to hear the sentence. Without it, “saw ur msg late” can read curt or apologetic. With :P it reads playful, unbothered. The emotion glyphs did the work that vocal inflection does in speech.

I had this idea I called Emoji Writing - what if we brought that same practice into longer-form prose? Not the social media way, where emojis replace words or pile up at the end of a caption. More like how a screenplay has parentheticals (sarcastically), (beat), (under her/his breath) - except lighter, inline, and using the emoticon vocabulary we already share.

Exempli gratia

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Plain text:

I spent three hours debugging a typo in a config file. The fix was changing a single character. I closed my laptop and went for a walk.

With emoji writing:

I spent three hours debugging a typo in a config file 😑 The fix was changing a single character 🤦‍♂️ I closed my laptop and went for a walk :tired:

The emojis add the tone the words can’t carry on their own, less subject to interpretation (which may not always be a good thing, but is better when used intentionally). The emoji can help disambiguate

• Was the walk angry or relieved?
• Was the debugging frustrating or funny in hindsight?

My Emoji Vocabulary

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These are the ones I reach for. Blog engines can render them natively from shortcodes, so this section doubles as a live test that they all work.