Increased usage of e-mail brings a variety of communication patterns. One way of clarifying verbal meaning within e-mail messages is through the use of visual symbols, or emoticons. Emoticons are visual cues formed from ordinary typographical symbols that when read sideways represent feelings or emotions. This paper reports results of a study about emoticons that appear in list e-mail traffic in higher education.
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Rezabek et al. (1998) studied this question.