How many times have a been mistakingly thought sarcastic or rude in an email or text? Like, heaps of times, and it's caused no end of hassle including having to explain myself again but in a longer form and sometimes via a telephone conversation, oh the horror! This is all because I've been coerced into thinking emoticons are stupid, where they actually are an excellent substitution in text based communication for body language which is so important in making yourself properly understood. An 'angry face' emoticon cannot be misinterpreted as joking around, a 'smiley with tongue out' is a clear expression of cheekily joking around and a 'smiley' clears up a lot of grey areas, consider the sentence ''I got the job!'' , now is that good or bad it's a little unclear, here's the solution ''I got the job : )'' now we clearly know what the typer is trying to express.
So to avoid awkward actual face to face communication I say should we rethink our stance on using emoticons, it's an excellent timesaver. While I'm on the subject of social interactions let's end shaking hands with ladies, ladies themselves quite often don't shake hands with each other on meeting and I don't see why men should have to either it's very awkward and everybody knows it! Shaking hands with men can be hard enough so I propose we all greet no matter of race, culture, age or sex with a high five, they are always fun right?
One more thing, if you know me even a little bit you don't have to start an email with 'Hi, how are you?'' you can just assume that I'm acceptably ok otherwise you would have seen a post from me whining about it on Facebook or Twitter, just tell me your information but make it clear and use emoticons, don't hide your text based feelings from me, it's eating into my day clarifying stuff.
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