Emoticons and Email Etiquette

(Image source: bestfreeicons.com, 2008)

Using emoticons while chatting through instant messaging tools or writing an email brings benefits and effectiveness in communication. I often use emoticons while chatting with my friends, not to only make my sentences looks more interesting, but also to make my friends understand or interpret my feeling or mood at the moment when I am talking about a certain topic. Below is an example when I am chatting with my friend.


The beginning of use of emoticons is about twenty five years ago, when Professor Fahlman came up with an idea where the told his colleagues to add a smiley face, which is simply made up of a few punctuation marks, to the end of a sentence when they were making jokes on the internet, and later, emoticons goes universal and evolves into images of graphis with animation, but there are still a lot of people prefer to use the old emoticons made up by three characters combining punctuation marks and alphabets (Funnell, 2007). In order not to make my friends misinterpret that I am angry or sad, I always add funny emoticons to the sentence to indicate that I am just joking, such as "XD" which means laughing, or ":P" which means sticking the tounge out, and it never fails to brighten up the situation while chatting or sending email. According to Prontes (2010), adding a lauging face to a sentence may help others to understand that a person is trying to tell a joke, because emoticons can help express feelings and emotions that cannot be shown through written words.

However, emoticons are not suitable to be used in all context, especially when we are talking about something serious. For example, I cannot use emoticons in a resumé when I am trying to apply for a job, it may give bad impression to the employer. Prontes (2010) stated that emoticons are informal and not serious which is not suitable to be use for professional context, but it is appropriate to be used between peers, lovers or family members. According to an article from New York Times witten by Williams (2007), Alexis Feldman, a director from a commercial real estate company, once got an email from her broker to inform her that their deal has been called off, and a frown face was added to the email, and she felt worse not only because she lost a deal but she felt that adding an emoticon to a serious email shows no sincerity and naive.

In my opinion, the are difference between the usage of emoticons between female and male. According to Williams (2007), the result obtained from Yahoo poll shows that 82 percent of respondents agreed that female are more likely to use emoticons than man. I think that women tend to use emoticons because they are more likely to express their feelings than men.

As a conclusion, using emoticons do improve the effectiveness in communication, but we have to be careful about the appropriateness of using them.

References:

1. Funnell, A 2007, Emoticons and email etiquette, ABC, viewed 5 June 2010, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2007/2064342.htm


2. Williams, A., 2007, (-: Just Between You and Me ;-), NY Timesm viewed 7 June 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/fashion/29emoticon.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2


3. Prontes, I., 2010, About emoticons, ehow.com, viewed 7 June 2010, http://www.ehow.com/about_4587652_emoticons.html