:) (Workshop Essay)

“Shrimp dinner tomorrow?” she asks with a parenthesis smile.

“Sounds great,” I exclaim with a wide grin, “Are you going to be hungry tonight?”

“No,” she admits, mouth an apologetic slash, “You will be tho!”

“Mhm! I’m going to devour you,” I throw a halo above my head for good measure.

Her lips form a capital O before shifting into that perfectly curved smile. She’s a master of playing it cool.

Conversations thumbed between cell phones these days never match the poetry of, say, letters written by Civil War soldiers to their loved ones in the late eighteen hundreds, but that doesn’t mean any less thought should go into them.

Ever since the dawn of man there have been people who’ve had something to say, though, not necessarily out loud. Long before the correspondences of Union and Confederate soldiers, and even longer before text messages, people were tapping out words on stone tablets or scratching them over papyrus. Laws, histories, poems, contracts, anything ancient note takers wanted records of would be inscribed on material that could be preserved for ages. In a time before data plans, hot spots and an ever growing amount of Gs, Mother Nature was the only mobile provider.

No doubt written language has come a long way since the pictographs that first conveyed meaning within early societies, yet it has always been said that history has a way of repeating itself. Emoticons, abbreviations or icons used on computer networks, specifically Smileys, may someday become the hieroglyphics that archaeological theses are written about. This idea alone drives me to compose texts (of the cell phone variety) that express exactly what I mean with the kind of short-hand elegance learned only from years of instant messaging.

To some lack-luster texters, punctuation has been devalued to a mere forgotten courtesy. Crude, single sentence memos hold the greatest chances of being misconstrued, so if this is how you prefer to communicate, you may have already had problems. It’s heartbreaking to see such a paltry response from someone you were eager to here from. Punctuation is defined as using “marks or characters in writing or printing in order to separate elements and make the meaning clear,” and how hard could it be to spice up your message with one or two extra characters?

The clever faces built from the available symbols on the keyboard are the next level of punctuation one can utilize to communicate how they feel. Despite being knocked over onto their side, Smileys offer facial expression where it normally isn’t seen. There’s the plain :) that makes you glad to have a friend. A grinning :D lets you know that you’ve brightened someone’s day by making them laugh. :( isn’t something you enjoy seeing, but people get sad sometimes. Hopefully you can turn that conversation around so they’re back to sending :-* and ;-). These are the simplest examples; there are a myriad of combinations and illustrations, but it doesn’t take jaw-dropping creativity to illuminate the tiny backlit manuscript that glows against your face in the back of a classroom :-O.

Text messages get deleted to make room for more text messages; perhaps such a disposable nature suppresses the urge to make them as enduring as a hand-written letter. It’s depressing to think about, so I prefer to view each instantaneous transmission as a new opportunity to link the vernacular of my generation with the careful passion of an old-fashioned gentleman caller.