Are Emojis Applicable in Academic Writing? 🖋

Students in the United States are increasingly using “network” jargon and emojis in essays and other papers. The style of emails and chats has firmly entered the language of American student’s homework. And in their academic writing, emojis and Internet abbreviations like LOL are increasingly coming across.

Many students admitted that they regularly enliven academic writing with emotional symbols – emojis and all sorts of “network” abbreviations. It is curious that the revealed picture does not frighten American teachers. Many of them do not see “anything disturbing” in it. If slang expressions or abbreviations appear in academic writing in the manner of emails, then for the teacher, this is just a good reason to explain to students that such vocabulary in a number of documents is inappropriate.

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The English language is on the verge of significant changes.

Richard Sterling, the Executive Director Emeritus of the National Writing Project, says that the English language as a whole is on the verge of significant changes anyway. In particular, soon, he does not exclude, even from serious books and documents, capital letters, which until now denoted the beginning of a sentence, will disappear.

The former professor at the University of California at Berkeley got this idea from a conversation with his own teenage son, to whom he could not clearly explain what additional information the capital letter after the dot at the end of the previous phrase carries.

However, scientists have made another discovery. As it turns out, most teens don’t feel like they’re using “real language” in emails, blogs, and social media. According to them, they use “real English” just at school. However, it is here scientists have established that they write every day, but much less than on the Internet after school.

We live in a new form of reality and communication.

Education is becoming a social industry of mass communications. New sources of information emerge. For today’s students, it is the Internet, whose users today are the younger generation. Meanwhile, according to recent surveys, children watch TV much less than their parents. The advent of the Internet has resulted in significant changes in the language.

However, the process affected more strongly not writing but reading. As it turned out, Internet texts have specific features, mainly – the brevity of presentation. Today, the text should be no larger than a page – otherwise, no one will read it. The user will simply open another web page – there are billions of them nearby, and it’s easier to find the right one.

Over a decade, a whole generation has grown up that has mastered writing but does not know how to read books. The authorities started talking seriously about the threat to the intellectual potential of the nation. Home reading has practically disappeared. The situation began to improve only in the last year or two, book publishers say.

Emojis are animated interjections.

Indeed, to some extent, emojis can be spoken of as revived interjections. They help to express this or that emotion in writing, and in this, their functions are similar. But at the same time, the range of interjections we use is sometimes much smaller than the number of emojis that we use in writing.

And this is quite understandable: it is unlikely that the emoji that we convey with a colon with a bracket, that is, a smiling smiley J, can be expressed by any interjection. The justification for using these symbols depends on many factors, primarily on the speech situation and the genre of the text we create.

If we conduct personal friendly correspondence, then, of course, they are appropriate. But if this is a text of a scientific, academic style or just a written communication between a student and a teacher, then in such situations, it is better not to use emojis, although there may be exceptions here.

Emojis in everyday communication.

In the modern world, with the development of information and other technologies, cardinal changes have taken place in many areas of human activity. The exchange of information takes place at an incredible speed. Communication on the Internet for most users has become closer to oral conversation than to correspondence in the traditional sense of writing. However, oral speech is characterized by various emotional shades and intonations. How should we convey it concisely, accurately, and, most importantly, quickly? For this, emoticons (emojis) were invented – brief images of human emotions using punctuation marks and special characters. Emoticons are widely used to enliven virtual communication – at online conferences, chats, forums, blogs, and guest books.

The emoji today has become one of the realities of our existence, which is increasingly moving into the electronic “astral.” A large number of varieties of emojis and the ease of their use can convey not all but most human emotions and feelings. That is why they are currently singled out as a separate speech genre.

Virtual communication has given rise to a special language – the language of virtual communication. This graphic language becomes an integral part of writing text messages. By themselves, emojis, without words, cannot convey any meaning other than an emotional one. But they help to decode the meaning of the verbal code much more accurately. The “language” of emojis has a fairly large set of lexical units, which, among other things, is constantly expanding. It has a peculiar alphabet – a set of constituent elements, different combinations of which encode different meanings.

Final Word

We conclude that academic writing is the best way to demonstrate your knowledge to a professor. They give you enough time to write a high-quality piece that should impress the reader. You should include logical and relevant arguments in your essay, using a formal writing style when presenting them. We strongly discourage you from using emojis in your academic writing. They will show your general ignorance of the main goal of such an assignment. Any proofreader will remove all emojis in your paper because otherwise, the emoticons will make your writing less academic.