**The following is an excerpt from Ralph Mooney’s forthcoming book, Lips Sealed: A Guide to Experimental Emoticoning ($29.99, Penguin).**

Not to brag, but I’ve some serious emoticon skills, and have yet to meet a better emoticoner. How do I know this? Well, let’s just say quite a few people have pointed it out to me, mostly unsolicited. In addition, I just know that I give good emoticon.

How does a person reach the upper echelon, the top pantheon if you will, of emoticonning? What sort of skills differentiates him from the unwashed masses of common emoticonners? It’s not an easy thing to pinpoint. You see, high level emoticonning is an art, not a science, guided mostly by intuition. There is, however, a common thread running through my work ; a few scholars have noted it, in particular Jay Ericson at Princeton in a recent Communication Arts article.

Ericson compared my work to the lyrics of Bob Dylan – always a twist of the unexpected. It’s true. I lead my audience one way, then switch it up in a pleasantly abrupt manner. Take this short Instant Message session as an example:

This exchange is a prime example of resourceful humor – one simple “baring teeth” emoticon carried an entire joke. Baring teeth caught Dan off guard, and he fell for my little prank (though there is nothing funny about cancer).

Like any art, superior emoticonning is about choices, and mine are bold.
How does one become fierce and fearless in the face (or rather faces) of emotionization? One important step is looking past the emoticon’s standard word definition and reading their visual language instead. If you can learn to do this (I doubt you can), your world will open up in ways I cannot describe.

Take this one for example:

What does it say to you? Pensive? Tranquil? Wise? Observant? Disappointed? AOL in fact calls it “disappointed”, but my point is that it says so much more. So much more.

At last year’s emoticon conference in Dallas, I gave a lecture discussing aspects of my technique. In the Q and A session that followed a fan asked me how I got so good. The answer is as predictable as the “happy” emoticon (rule #16: never use the happy emoticon.): practice, practice, practice! I’m talking years of emoting. Those three-year emoticon programs (E.A. degrees) are a good start, but are not a substitute for time in the saddle. You need to eat, sleep and breathe those ‘cons, day in and day out, until they become unconscious.

Which takes me to the end of this chapter and the beginning of the next:
Emoticons and the Unconscious: a Jungian Perspective.

Coming next week!

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