- Tone Indication in Textual Communication
Tone is rather difficult to convey over text, unless writing dialogue where you can write ‘Person said angrily’. Unless careful with chosen message phrasing and choice of diction, it is very easy for the wrong emotion to be conveyed. In speech, intonation is a major part of effective conversation.
Multiple attempts have been made at addressing this issue. Most interesting in my opinion is assorted new punctuation. For example, the ‘snigger point’ or ‘note of cachinnation’ (◡) to be used for indicating ironic sentences or clauses, the SarcMark™ as a sarcasm full stop alternate, or the upside down exclamation point (¡) as another sarcasm indicator. Other similar attempts at new punctuation include the percontation point (⸮) for rhetorical questions or the interrobang (‽) as a combination of a question and exclamation mark.
However, much more commonly applied in actual communication are tone indicators. There are a great very many, but the ones which see frequent and common usage are:
| Tone | Meaning |
|---|---|
| /j or /jk | Joking |
| /hj | Half-joking |
| /s | Sarcastic |
| /gen or /g | Genuine |
| /gq or /genq | Genuine Question |
| /srs | Serious |
They’re used by appending the indicator to the end of the message, like so: ‘Nice face /s’. They originate from HTML-style presentations (<sarcasm>Nice face</sarcasm>), but over time people dropped the angle brackets and opening indicator while shortening the indicator’s name to what we have today.