Why is tone so hard to convey in writing? Literally and symbolically, writing flattens language. That can cause problems, as anyone who has ever misread the tone of an email can attest. It reduces the emotional immediacy of speech, leaving writers with the challenge of adding enough context to help the reader intuit intent as well as the impact of words.
Speech depends on so much more than words and grammar. A significant percentage of meaning is conveyed in spoken language through paralinguistic elements (tone, inflection, body language, etc.). One oft-cited figure given is that 38% (and up to 90%) of meaning can come from nonverbal cues, including tone. (Those figures are from research into “emotionally loaded messages” by Albert Mehrabian, so add a pinch of salt for generalization, but you get the point.)
So writing has a built-in limitation: how to capture the nuanced information of speech in writing. The problem is that there are far too many combinations of the elements of meaning to discretely encode in a “flattened” system.
Punctuation to the rescue?
Punctuation is a natural place to look for help, since it already links syntax and interpretation. Replace a question mark with an exclamation point and the sentence’s purpose shifts; changing a comma can change the meaning of a phrase—so why not use other punctuation to guide interpretation of text? Over the years, various orthographical solutions have been proposed, including leftward-slating italics to indicate irony.
In the 1580s, Henry Denham (a printer) proposed the percontation point—a reversed question mark—to indicate a rhetorical question. It was used for maybe a century, but was never widely adopted.
It’s too bad those ideas never took off, because they do seem like they’d be helpful. However, it’s not surprising. Nuance naturally resists codification.
Denham’s proposal falls short as a general solution, for instance, because even rhetorical questions can serve different emotional purposes. Yelling “are you kidding me?” when you get a parking ticket is quite different from a professor asking “what is truth?” So the natural impulse is to develop multiple flavors of percontation points and it would rapidly get out of hand.
What about pictographs?
Emoticons (or emojis) are a modern attempt to solve the issue, which is more pronounced in shorter texts that offer less context to help the reader. It started simply enough, in the days when you might add 🙂 in an email to say “this is intended as humor.” It was just shorthand to represent the emotional intent of written words.
They no longer serve that purpose, because they have become semantically meaningful in their own right. A given emoji can have multiple meanings based on context (including who’s using it). I often hesitate to use them for fear of introducing a meaning I didn’t intend.
It certainly seems like we are developing a parallel pictographic writing system. It’s quite possible to send an emoji-only text that conveys a complete thought.
And we’ve continued to expand the “dictionary” as we’ve tried to capture more and more meaning through these graphics. For example, think about all the different things a human smile can mean, and you see why there’s been a proliferation of smiley emoticons.
A screenshot of many different smiley face emojis
The attempt to capture emotional nuance through icons—and to have a complete vocabulary available—means that these little graphics now require interpretive work that’s not that different from reading text.
Less specific = more flexible
I think the way emojis have developed shows why percontation points and the like weren’t workable. Our current set of common punctuation covers the basics, and while they do affect meaning (“eats, shoots and leaves”) they don’t have much semantic meaning on their own. (Not none, just not much.)
Punctuation marks have not proliferated the way emojis have, because their purpose is to clarify grammar, not to convey meaning. We haven’t needed to layer in a set of nuanced percontation points, because we use the words themselves to get our ideas and emotional points across.
Writing may flatten language, but it is a relatively stable system for encoding our thoughts. It works because it is flexible and depends on combinations of elements for meaning—just like speech does.
