How do you convey emotions in text?

🙂

People will often think I'm mad when talking in a way that I think is perfectly normal or that I'm a brick wall while discussing disagreements and well, that can't be fun.

On IMs, there are a bunch of heuristics that I've identified that seem to be a kind of shared culture - I learned them through osmosis, and discovered them when seeing them violated by people less Internet-savvy. Examples:

• Writing sentences starting with a capital letter and ending with full stop makes you look serious. If you do that, be consistent - but this style generally belongs to e-mails and comments, like the one I'm just writing here.
• Typically, IM messages are single sentences that start lowercase and - that's very important - do not end with a full stop. Want to cram more than a sentence worth of text in one message? Consider using semicolons. But if you start lowercase, do not end with a full stop.
• A full stop in such a case is something my acquaintances and I call a "full stop of hate". It seems to be universally read as expressing a negative emotion, such as anger, that weighs the message heavily.
• Similarly, ellipsis at the end of an IM message is a clear expression of disappointment about the subject of the sentence, and will piss people off if used inappropriately.
• For positive emotions, make good use of emoticons. The regular ones: :) for positive feelings, ;) for a tongue-in-cheek, etc. Usually one every couple messages is enough to remind the other side your messages are written in good mood - beyond that, you can use them to reinforce or change the mood of a particular sentence.
• Don't spam emojis, most adults hate it. Best bet is to use none at all.

I think that's also because I write the same way I speak and so, it just sounds strange.

Remember that text communicates much less of information than speech - even without seeing your body language and facial expressions, there's many bits of relevant context encoded in the tone of your voice. That gets lost when translating to text, so you have to pad your text with words, or construct phrases, that evoke the feelings you would ordinarily transmit out-of-band.

I had a co-worker once that always seemed angry at me and other coworkers whenever we talked with him over text, but then he was surprisingly easy-going when talked to over video. It took me a while to figure out why it's the case - but eventually I realized that most of the perceived anger comes from his misuse of full stops and ellipsis in text chats. The remaining part of the impression came from his laconic style, giving you very terse answers that didn't qualify uncertainty or communicate emotions.

For that last part, imagine a scenario: we come to work one morning to see some developer complaining that the project doesn't work anymore because of some runtime errors. This guy would reply to this, on a public chat, things like "ok.", and then "@TeMPOraL ↑↑ your commit...". My immediate reaction to seeing this was thinking, "oh come on, fuck off, I didn't even touch this". But he wasn't really trying to pin the blame on me - what he meant was, "kk, I'll look into it" and "@TeMPOraL, your commit was the last one prior to break, could you chime in?".

So that's what I'd look for if people think you're angry or "a brick wall" in IM chats. IM protocol, particularly around punctuation, and whether you're communicating enough information about your mind state - vs. tersing it down to bare minimum and hoping others will figure it out.

It's also something I've more recently struggled with because I'm trying to write personally on my blog and I'm not exactly sure how to convey my feelings other than stating it like a robot like "This makes me mad" or "That's depressing" or "It makes me feel great".

How do you do that when you talk to people face-to-face? You probably use different constructs, depending on the type and strength of your emotions. "Holy shit this website is garbage" vs. "This website annoys me to no end" vs. "I don't like this website, because $reasons". This works for text just the same. Sometimes the entire paragraph will look different, depending on the way you want to make it sound.

That said, be mindful of the medium. People have different expectations for a blog vs. a Facebook post, a Tweet, an IM message. I personally expect blog articles to read like thoughts of someone who had their chance to calm down. It can be emotional, but in a controlled fashion. Meanwhile, I'm not surprised seeing emotional outbursts on Twitter.

For people who find this sort of question interesting, I can highly recommend the book Because Internet, which looks at the evolving linguistics of online, primarily text-based communication

Thanks for posting.
I sometimes feel the same way and would love to read how others go about this!