1

“To write well, express yourself like the common people but think like a wise man” – Aristotle

In this chapter, we investigate how written language conveys emotions, emphasis, or feelings based on how it is presented. The earliest forms of written language, as crucial as they are to the history of modern communication, looked nothing like the writing systems we have today. In fact, many of the earliest forms of writing were inventory lists, with images to show the item and tally marks to track the number. They were about as “dry” as communication can get. How, then, did written languages develop to the point where they enable us to portray emotions across time and space, simply by what we are putting on the page? How can our brains possibly process this information and turn it into feelings and emotions? The answer? People are creative—and our brains work hard.

Getting the Message 

It is quite the question, in reality. How, from mere marks on paper or pixels in space, are feelings and emotions actually evoked?  Further, you might be shocked to learn that experts believe that reading is very hard for our brains, using multiple evolutionarily adapted other capacities (Tagg, 1986). Through the adaptations of our older evolutionary apparatus to process the abstract symbols of written language into an interpretive metric of expression, we somehow create consistent narratives between many readers’ reactions.

Language, to our brains, is both communicative and constitutive. In all communication, verbal or written, we convey multiple functions [as Roman Jakobson pointed out], including referential, informative functions as well as the emotive function. Listeners and readers seek to understand all the purposes of the message, including its emotional force, whether it’s overtly stated or implied. Take, for example, we understand the sentence “I am upset” to mean that someone is, indeed, upset, the same way that we would garner the same end-answer from a narrative explaining that someone is crying or even when a rather loquacious friend is much more curt over text (though, in this example, we lose the context of what specific emotion the person may be experiencing, and, rather, find them categorically “upset” in some nature). This is in part due to the emotional intelligence of the reader, of course, but often, at a baseline, is tied to our ability to construct emotional expectations from the aforementioned inherent categories of emotion. But sometimes we can draw these conclusions even when the author doesn’t tell us explicitly what they feel.

It really comes down to sensation. We learn to categorically act to link physical and internal emotional sensations with our perceptions. Just as visual sensations, like facial expressions, are important to us as they are made meaningful by the internal states they convey, conceptual information in our minds is important for providing the linkages–indexicalities–paramount to our understanding and expression in the world. So you might be wondering how language actually plays into such a thing. Well, language helps us “acquire, organize, and use the concept of knowledge” (Lindquist, et al., 2015) that gives us the ability to perceive and synthesize our emotional perceptions and link them to our sensations and even our experiences! Neurologically, there is a link between linguistic and conceptual systems. Language helps us to understand new concepts, after all! From there, it is easy to see that signs in the form of writing are not much different from facial expressions or other forms of non-verbal communication. All are signs. In the same way that we perceive the first, we perceive written language. No matter what the stimuli are that allow us to understand and unify our perceptions within our feelings, we still experience a similar mechanism of our body “incepting” the sensations of our body from the knowledge represented in the body. Make sense?

See? Our brain really can take scribbles on a page – things we were never meant evolutionarily to “read” – and use them in the same way that our old-school evolutionary systems use to tie our world and our bodily experiences to our feelings and our higher level thought, which we think is pretty amazing!

Important terms to keep in mind:

Emotion: a natural instinctive state of mind deriving from one’s circumstances, mood, or relationships with others. (Oxford)

Feelings of Emotions: The actual external output generated by the experience of an emotion.

Perceptions: External stimuli that are then interpreted and assigned an emotional response.

Emotional Expectations:

Editor of Writing Emotions, Susan Knaller writes that written literature triggers emotions through its use of “experiencing, naming, describing, understanding, regulating and codifying models of emotion and feeling along with their respective practices” (Knaller 2017, 19).  In simpler terms, this means that the emotions we feel when reading a text are tied to our understanding of the underlying “code” that language facilitates and the expectations we have for that text. Further, it is tied not just to our expectation for that text, but expectations based on the norms of written language as a whole. When we are reading a given text, emotion is not a tangible thing, like the pages of the book or the smell of ink on the page. It doesn’t jump from the page to wrap us in a hug and make us feel happy, nor does it cry beside us when it wants to make us feel sad. Therefore, to create emotion, an author has to utilize this “code” that we have developed over the past three millennia to inspire the reader’s imagination, immersing the reader so far into this imagined world that they believe themselves to be properly engaged with it.

So what is this code constructed of, then? It’s surely not the ones and zeros we think of when we think of stereotypical computer code, nor is it a secret language we need a decoder to discern. It’s constructed using syntax and grammar, typography and punctuation. That isn’t to say that the way someone writes will elicit the same reaction from everyone, and that is where our coding analogy ends. As Vera Nünning writes in “The Affective Value of Fiction Presenting and Evoking Emotion,” “What we feel depends not only on the stimulus but also on the situation in which we perceive this stimulus and on the causes which prompted the action or state evoking our emotions” (Nünning 2017, 31). Unlike something as straightforward as a computer reading ones and zeros, the ability to feel the emotions that a writer has instilled in their writing is dependent both on that reader’s situation as they are receiving this stimuli, as well as their own past experiences and actions.

Take reading a sad story for example—why do we feel emotion when we are just reading words on a page? We aren’t directly engaging with something sad in the “real” world, so why does it have this power over us? How does the author express this emotion? For situations like this, here regarding stories but also applicable in other mediums like text messages, emails, or more, the way that we encounter emotion is through the acceptance or rejection of the narrative script, or the expected structure of the writing in what is called “emotion scripts” (Nünning 2017, 32). Scenes in a story follow the scripts for a certain kind of narrative that, if we were to experience in our own daily lives, would invoke a particular emotion. It makes us imagine a world in which we could be in that person’s shoes, experiencing that emotion. However, the manner in which a specific individual is affected is dependent on them. The script is there, as is the intention, but if you don’t think a certain situation is sad, the narrative is unlikely to persuade you otherwise.

However, evoking emotion is not limited to narrative stories. Other written mediums do this as well, utilizing the tools of grammar and punctuation to demonstrate and then evoke a particular emotion.

Punctuation and Formality:

When writing, we use the tools at our disposal to communicate what we’re feeling. We aren’t robots devoid of emotion, but humans full of it. The problem with trying to insert our emotions in text? It’s hard. How many times have you sent a text or an email only to realize that it sounds a bit ruder than what you meant it to be? How many times has one of your friends not understood your joke that was just a stroke of pure genius? All of us can remember at least one or two times where something like this has happened.

As we’re writing this, we’re questioning ourselves: Is this formal? Is this informal? A mixture of both? We would say it’s our stream of consciousness meant for all to understand. We’re not trying to be overly academic nor are we trying to talk to our friends. In school, you are taught what is “proper English”: Capitalize this. Add a comma here. Don’t forget the period. But these aren’t the rules that we as North American college students in 2021 use when texting friends, posting on social media, or searching Google. The internet has its own form of writing. It helps us connect with everyone else. We all know someone who texts dreadfully long sentences with all the proper punctuation and grammar, sometimes we are that person.

Our language on the internet is full of shortened sentences and new forms of punctuation. We YELL, *whisper*, and so much more. Strong emotions can be conveyed through text. One common way to show emotion is to capitalize words. Capitalized words make happy messages happier and tell the reader that the text is meant to be read in a louder, faster, and higher pitch than normal (McCulloch 2019). Other ways to express emotion include using italics, underlining, using larger letters, and changing the font color.

It is also possible to express passive aggressiveness. Read the following few lines of an example text conversation.

Sarah: You going to the party?

Alice: I am.

In this example, Alice ends her short sentence with a period, breaking the cardinal rule of texting with friends among young people “Don’t use periods in short texts.” Extra punctuation can cause the receiving party concern for worry (McCullouch 2019). Is there some hidden meaning behind the period? Why did Alice put a period where there usually isn’t one? Is she mad? These are questions that would typically be circling around Sarah’s mind.

Although we’ve been talking primarily about negative emotions, punctuation is also used for showing positive emotions! If you saw what we did there, we commend you. Think about the last time you used an exclamation mark. Was it really there to convey a strong emotion like it was meant to be? Or were you trying to be polite and make the message seem friendly? Probably the latter. One study by Carol Waseleski found that in emails exclamation marks were more often used to indicate friendliness and emphasize statements of fact than to indicate strong language (2006).

And though some people may disagree, at least one of the authors of this chapter is a funny person both in person and online. There are a lot of components taken into account when making a joke. Although not always present, sarcasm is a common feature. But as you’ve probably experienced, conveying sarcasm online can be hard. On Reddit, it is common for posters to add “/s” to the end of the posts to signify that they were being sarcastic in their post and for others to not take them seriously. Some people use /j similarly to mean that their post was just a joke. As simple as this is, the directness of this approach can ruin the joke itself. There are other ways to convey sarcasm online, although all with a varying degree of success. As linguist Dr. Gretchen McCulloch details in her book Because Internet (2019), the sarcasm tilde origin’s can be traced back to the internet, unlike other ways to denote sarcasm. Consider the following sentence:

I look ~wonderful~

Would you think that this person really thinks that they look great today? The playful addition that the tilde adds specifically contradicts the idea of wonderful. As McCulloch explains, it becomes sarcasm because the person reading it makes the conclusion “You might have used this word seriously here, but I know you wouldn’t use it excitedly. And yet you’ve added sparkles anyway, and they’re definitely not a serious thing. So if you’re not sincere, and you’re not truly excited, then it must be ironic excitement” (McCulloch 2019, 138).

Other languages have their own forms of communicating sarcasm through text. Chinese users rely on techniques different from English users when conveying sarcasm online. Some common forms include the frequent use of proverbs, use of quotation marks to mark stress, exaggeration of honorifics, and use of homophony (Liu et al. n.d.). In English, people are more likely to use hyperbole, use capital letters to mark stress, and use positive words to demarcate sarcasm.

Punctuation is important. Teachers always stress proper grammar in class, but that doesn’t mean that we should listen to their advice outside of it. The presence and absence of certain punctuation marks can change the meaning of a message.

Conclusions: 

Unlike when writing first appeared in the Mesopotamian 5,500 years ago, writing nowadays? It’s complicated. Sure, our days of tiny images and corresponding tally marks may not be over, and they likely never will, but written language is infinitely more complicated and nuanced than it used to be. Then again, it has to be, to achieve what we want it to. Authors are constantly trying to convey different things with their writing, make us feel different things and, well, teach us different things. Our brains race along in response, translating these written words into something they can understand, drawing on the expectations we have based on a particular writing style or grammatical construction, and churning out emotions. From there, the world is limitless. If we can feel inspired by written words to feel a particular emotion, then our messages can truly be spread across the globe.

References

Knaller, Susanne. 2017. “Emotions and the Process of Writing.” In Writing Emotions: Theoretical Concepts and Selected Case Studies in Literature, edited by Ingebord Jandl, Susanne Knaller, Sabine Schönfellner and Gudrun Tockner. Transcript Verlag. 17-26.

Lindquist, Kristen A., Ajay B. Satpute, and Maria Gendron. “Does Language Do More Than Communicate Emotion?” Current Directions in Psychological Science 24, no. 2 (2015): 99–108. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44318837.

Liu, Peng, Wei Chen, Gaoyan Ou, Tengjiao Wang, Dongqing Yang, and Kai Lei. n.d. “Sarcasm Detection in Social Media Based on Imbalanced Classification.” Web-Age Information Management, 8485:459–71. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08010-9_49.

McCulloch, Gretchen. 2019. Because Internet : Understanding the New Rules of Language. New York, NY: Riverhead Books.

Nünning, Vera. 2017. “The Affective Value of Fiction Presenting and Evoking Emotions.” In Writing Emotions: Theoretical Concepts and Selected Case Studies in Literature, edited by Ingebord Jandl, Susanne Knaller, Sabine Schönfellner and Gudrun Tockner. Transcript Verlag. 29-49.

Tagg, John. 1986. “Speaking Is Natural and Writing Is Invented : The Social and Private Aspects of How We Communicate With Each Other.” Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-11-27-vw-13319-story.html

Waseleski, Carol. 2006. “Gender and the Use of Exclamation Points in Computer-Mediated Communication: An Analysis of Exclamations Posted to Two Electronic Discussion Lists.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11 (4): 1012–24. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2006.00305.x.