Hi Writers,
Oh, the guilt I felt when I read this New York Times article about emoticon usage:
"Just Between You and Me"

Here's a brief excerpt (but I recommend reading the piece in full): There's also a link to a full-range of emoticons for the aficionado.

"Emoticons, the smiling, winking and frowning faces that inhabit the computer keyboard, have not only hung around long past their youth faddishness of the 1990s, but they have grown up. Twenty-five years after they were invented as a form of computer-geek shorthand, emoticons — an open-source form of pop art that has evolved into a quasi-accepted form of punctuation — are now ubiquitous.

No longer are they simply the province of the generation that has no memory of record albums, $25 jeans or a world without Nicole Richie. These Starburst-sweet hieroglyphs, arguably as dignified as dotting one’s I’s with kitten faces, have conquered new landscape in the lives of adults, as more of our daily communication shifts from the spoken word to text. Applied appropriately, users say, emoticons can no longer be dismissed as juvenile, because they offer a degree of insurance for a variety of adult social interactions, and help avoid serious miscommunications."

I have to admit to being a user/abuser and an enabler of emoticon usage. As the moderator of the Writer's Digest forum I've seen first-hand how a well-placed emoticon (on the forum, we call our multi-expression guy the little blue man), can:

• give levity to a sarcastic post ; )

• cheer up a person in low spirits : )

• share the pain in someone's rejection : (