Should Emojis or Emoticons Ever Appear in Your Writing?

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Do Emojis Belong in Serious Literature?

Emojis or emoticons in text messages and social media comments can take the place of facial expressions, emotions, and objects. Sometimes they provide just the touch you need to make a point.

But do they belong in books?

Before We Proceed …

You’ll find disagreements about the definitions of emoji and emoticon, and how to form the plurals.

According to Britannica.com: “… if you come across a smiley face that contains a character you can find on your computer keyboard, it’s an emoticon. If it’s a little cartoon figure that is free from the binds of punctuation, numbers, and letters, it’s an emoji.”

So:

  • ; (semicolon) + ) (closing parenthesis) is an emoticon.
  • 😉 is an emoji.

Plural: Emoji or Emojis?

The majority of internet pages use emojis to indicate plural. So let’s stick with that throughout this post.

Consider This Piece of Flash Fiction

Barney was a 🐱, a 😻. But he had a bad habit. He 💗 to eat 🐌s.

Big 🐌s. Little 🐌s. In-between 🐌s.

And it wasn’t enough to eat them. He insisted on bringing the shells into the 🏠.

Several times a day, Brenda swept up the shells and shooed Barney out of the 🏠. But you know the old song, “The 🐱 Came Back”? That’s just what Barney did.

And for Brenda, stepping on the 🐌shells was like walking on broken glass.

One day, she decided she was 😩 of Barney’s shenanigans.

[Here’s where I stalled. Windows key + period key to the rescue. (See the section labelled How to Create Emojis.) Random scrolling through the available emojis provided some ideas. I also needed a few minutes to google “foods that cats hate.”]

She 🚗 to the gourmet food store and 💳 a large 📦 of empty escargot shells. At 🏠 she stuffed them with a mixture of 🍌s and vinegar. Then she arranged them throughout the yard.

Well … Barney tried a couple of Brenda’s treats, spat them out, and pranced back through the 🐱🚪 with his tail held high.

No more problems with Barney and 🐌s.

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All Right, Folks

This isn’t a literary masterpiece. (I say that again. And again.)

Were you able to follow the story? Or were you confused by the emojis? It’s unlikely you’ll find them in mainstream writing, but who knows what might happen over the next few years?

How to Create Emojis

The following shortcuts work in WordPress and Microsoft Word.

Windows users: Press and hold the Windows button and then the period (.) or semicolon (;), and a list of available emojis will appear.

Macintosh users: Tap Command + Control + space to open the Mac character viewer.

You’ll find this approach especially handy on social media.

Color or Black-and-White?

Although your local document may display in black-and-white, you should see colored characters online.

Back to the Original Premise

Do emojis belong in serious writing? Maybe not yet.

However, they could lend a unique touch to a fiction competition or perhaps an experimental flash fiction journal.

A Few Experimental Pieces on This Website

Some of the pieces provide links to journals where you’ll find more experimental fiction.

More Sites Where You Can Read and/or Submit Experimental Fiction

These online journals will impart a feel for this type of fiction. They’re active today, but if you find one that becomes unavailable in the future, please leave a comment. Ditto if you know of another journal that might be of interest to writers.

Thanks!

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11 thoughts on “Should Emojis or Emoticons Ever Appear in Your Writing?”

  1. I didn’t see emoji instructions for Linux, meaning OpenOffice (or LibreOffice). It turns out that they’re called Emoticons – good to know when you’re searching the Internet for them. They aren’t supported by default. However, there’s an extension that you can download and install. Here’s the link to the extension:
    https://extensions.openoffice.org/en/tags/emoticons
    Click on “AutoText – EmotiKons” then click on “Download Extension”. Pause on this screen to read the only documentation about it: “Type 🙂 followed by (F3) and you will get a smiley picture.” You get a file called autotext_emoticons.oxt
    Launch OpenOffice (LibreOffice in my case) – the Writer (word processor) tool. From the Tools menu, select the Extension Manager… and click the Add button. You may have to navigate to the file, but it simply came up for me.

    Then type 🙂 and the F3 key. Smiles all the way.

    Why isn’t this preinstalled? No idea. It looks like no one has paid any attention to it since it was released in 2007.

    Would i use emojis in a book? That would be “no”. There isn’t a way to add the extension to my Remington.

    • Thanks for the info, Stephen!

      I haven’t used a typewriter for a long time, and it’s understandable that the Remington would limit your emoji use.

      For now, though, emojis are probably an experimental fiction prop.

  2. Hi Kathy. Definitely not. This was a great exercise to demonstrate why not to use them. It slows down the reading by having to figure out a puzzle to continue. The flow is gone. Also, texting and emailing are not book writing where many words convey a story, they are correspondence, which I don’t mind them used as an expressed sentiment. But that’s me. 🙂 x

    • Thanks, DG.

      The Egyptians had hieroglyphics, so who knows what the future might hold? Not for today, though, right? But experimental fiction …?

    • We recently purchased a newer car. We still have the older car from the same manufacturer. The newer car has a 500+ page user’s manual, which i downloaded to my phone. Yesterday’s exercise was to figure out how the headlights work. Half an hour of reading and guessing over dinner, then five minutes of experimentation with the car. We’d done ten minutes of experimentation before reading the manual, to no avail. There are icons, related to emojis, all over the car. My favorite is the bullet being shot to the right. It turns out that this means “high beams”. So, that’s also the answer to the question, “Read the 500+ page manual or work out what the icons mean?” It’s clear that there are people who understand all of the features of the edutainment system but do not get how the signals work. We didn’t need the manual for working the signals. I read that part anyway, and it turns out that they work like any other signals i’ve used in a car.

  3. Interesting stuff, Kathy. I’ve looked, but never been able to find, a list of emojis and/or emoticons with an explanation of what they actually mean. Any idea where I might fidn such a definitive list, please?

  4. To my mind the purpose of language is to communicate which, as I’ve discovered in several science vs religion online debates, is problematic enough even if you’re all using words. While I accept pictures are an entirely acceptable form of communication, after all the Egyptians did it (didn’t they?), I think it just muddies the water for “real” writing.

    I could read the pieces above but it wasn’t easy.

    • Great points, James. I wonder if that would change, though, if we had a larger selection of emojis. English road signs with images are understood by speakers of other languages.

      It would be fascinating to enter a time machine and travel to the future.

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