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Tuesday, 18 November 2003 11:22am |
ROFL LOL BTW
:-) ;-) :-o
*g* *s*
There are literally hundreds (if not thousands!) of these little characters out there in newsgroups, chat rooms, email messages, bulletin boards etc and I'm sure you've even seen a few on websites (especially personal websites) ...basically they're hard to avoid because they're everywhere! But what are they?
Quite simply they fall into the category of Acronyms, Smilies or Emoticons. They're not just a cute add-on or an expression of personality as these wonderful little keystrokes are in fact highly versatile and very functional.
[SMILEYS
& EMOTICONS]
:-) if you tilt your head to the left you will recognise a smiling face...cute! Cuteness aside, black and white text can be very blunt and is easily misinterpreted as text lacks the visual and auditory clues people use to assess the 'tone' of a conversation. By using smilies you can put back some of these visual :-) smiling and auditory :-))) laughing clues that are essential for keeping a comment/conversation within the context that it was intended.
[ACRONYMS]
...are great time savers and can make participating in a chat room a whole lot easier as they allow you to type less, which equates to faster, which in turn means you can keep up with the conversations going on around you. Nothing is worse than trying to participate in a conversation only to find that by the time you've typed your response and are ready to push 'enter' the conversation has moved on or the topic changed completely! IMHO is a lot faster to type than In My Humble Opinion, as with ppl (people), r (are), 4 (for) etc.
Always remember the #1 rule of Netiquette.....typing in CAPITAL letters is considered SHOUTING so don't do it .... no one likes to be shouted at :-( The only exeption to this rule is when your using acronyms and even then it does depend on the people that your conversing with.
{no-combomax}
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Talk the Talk
