Smiley Intervention
It came to my attention a few weeks ago that I’ve developed the habit of annotating all my emails and instant messages with too many smileys, so I decided to kick the habit. I’ve gone a week so far and only used 2 smileys that whole time in situations where I thought it was absolutely necessary.
It’s been tough, especially since I default to semi-sarcastic tone in lots of my communication, so removing the smileys makes me look mean. That’s forced me to change my communication style to accomodate for the lack of smileys, which overall is a good thing — I expect it’ll make me a more pleasant person to talk to.
The realisation that I frequently use sarcasm to communicate was a little sobering because it reminded me some past mistakes. While I was at college my mates and I got into the habit of sledging each other and everybody around us all the time as our default pattern of communication. It didn’t really occur to us that it was obnoxious until we made one of our friends burst into tears and tell us to stop being so mean.
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