As I have mentioned previously (I need more sleep. More sleep, more sleep, more sleep) I once met the playwright Alan Ayckbourn. When I met him he started banging on about how useless emoticons were*. He suggested that if something were funny then it didn't need pointing out.

How someone can miss the point so spectacularly is beyond me. Emoticons are very useful, particularly when used in online conversation rather than correspondence.

And this is the point he missed. Why, I'm sure he thought, should they be necessary now when all they are doing is effectively writing letters. But the key difference is speed. And not just speed of writing causing sloppiness, but also speed of digestion. Partially this is due to its online status as not of a high order, but it's mainly because the recipient can reply quickly and easily and so might be keen to reply to something vaguely offensive in your first subordinate clause not waiting to see it cancelled out in the second.

These are probably millions of emotions out there but there are three which are clearly the most important. The first is ":)" without the quotes obviously. This is very simply a lift to the end of your sentence. The exact equivalent to the thing people have been forcing the exclamation point into doing for years. It also has a second function which we'll come to in a second.

The second one is ";)" without the quotes again. This adds a note of sarcasm to what you're saying. Which enables me to explain ":)"'s second use which is to take something that sounds sarcastic and render it serious or at least a seriously funny thing to say.

And finally I present "LOL" without quotes too but by now you probably have that. "LOL" isn't really an emoticon as such, in fact it's an abbreviation for "Laugh out loud". This one is especially useful for dealing with the situation of what would be not surprisingly, laughing but actually more accurately applause. If you laughed during their performance but they couldn't hear you the next time you saw them you might clap to show your appreciation and this is much the same thing. But use it sparingly or you'll have nowhere to go when something really funny happens.

* Emoticons are the collective word which contains smilies. It's appearance stems from the fact that the symbols don't just smile but can also frown.