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Please stop using emojis :)

People use texting in a variety of ways. Some use them to send a quick message in emergency situations, others keep a day-long conversation running with a friend and many are somewhere in between.

With these different types of texters come varied styles of messages, making it difficult to gauge how your receiver will interpret your text. Will they understand your sarcasm? Do you need to use proper grammar? or can u txt w out real words nd its ok ?

To even further complicate things, we add emojis.

According to emojipedia.org (yes, the icons have their own website), there are 845 emoji characters supported on most platforms.

Just think about the time lost scrolling through all of these icons to find that one smiling poop guy.

But the real problem isn’t the few wasted minutes spent searching through the images, rather it’s some texters actually take emojis seriously. I have sat with friends for minutes on end as they decide which half smiling face will make the receiver think they are just interested enough in the conversation but not overly so.

Emojis are making it difficult for us to express our thoughts without the help of a picture. Placing so much importance on frivolous text images is ridiculous.

Now, I understand not everyone uses emojis so seriously. The cute things can add some flavor and humanity to our texting, but we could accomplish this by reverting back to just a few simple emoticons.

Emoticons show a full range of emotions: happy :), sad :(, broken hearted </3 and surprised :O, to name a few.

I’d even be OK with getting a little fancy and texting the non-rotated emoticons to show emotions such as excited \(^o^)/ or nervous (-_-;).

But that’s all you need. Otherwise, why not explain what you mean in words and save time searching through seven pages of faces and hand gestures to find the girl who’s shrugging?

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