What Does Blog Writing Need to Express Personal Emotion?
Have you ever reread a message after sending it?
Maybe you typed, “I understand.” Then, worried it might sound cold, you added a tilde or an emoji. It may seem like a small thing, but moments like this reveal how uneasy we often feel about text as a medium.
The things I chose because words alone were not enough to express my feelings
When we are speaking face to face, imperfect wording is rarely a serious problem.
There are facial expressions, vocal tones and gestures. The words “It’s okay” can offer comfort when accompanied by a smile, yet sound like rejection when delivered with a hard expression.
But once all those cues disappear and only the text remains, the same sentence can be read in completely different ways.
Communication researchers describe this as the absence of nonverbal cues in online conversation.
On a screen where only text remains, nothing takes over the role that facial expressions and body language play in face-to-face conversation.
The same sentence—“Yes, I understand”—can sound compliant in one context and cold in another. The problem is that neither the sender nor the recipient can be certain of the difference from text alone.
That is, in fact, why emojis first became so widely popular.
In the early days of text messaging, when character counts were limited, it was difficult to convey emotion in a short sentence—and easy for the message to be misunderstood.
Emojis emerged to bridge that gap and quickly became part of everyday communication.
One survey found that by around 2015, 80 percent of users in South Korea said they used mobile emojis regularly.
A single small image can change the temperature of a message.
This is not merely a matter of personal impression; the effect has been demonstrated in research.
Studies of online communication have found that when the emotional tone of an emoji matches the emotional tone of the accompanying text, ambiguity decreases and recipients understand the message more readily.
In other words, a single image can make a sentence clearer. The expression on a character’s face can convey nuances that words alone cannot fully explain.
But images were not the answer for every emotion.
There is an interesting twist, however. Research comparing the effects of different emotional types found that graphic and animated emojis were more effective when conveying happiness or pleasure. For unpleasant or negative emotions, by contrast, text-only messages proved more effective. When the emotion is delicate—comfort or an apology, for example—a plain sentence may feel more sincere than an elaborate image.
Ultimately, the question was not “Image or words?” but “What will convey my sincerity more precisely in this moment?”
There is no reason that dilemma should remain confined to messaging apps.
That leaves us with a question.
Why has this problem been addressed only inside messaging apps such as KakaoTalk?
The same issue arises when we write a blog post, leave a greeting on a website or share our feelings in a comment.
A post packed with text may be precise, yet still feel stiff. Often, the warmth behind what we really wanted to say fails to come through.
Decoblocks is an attempt to bring this language of emotional expression—once used mainly in messaging apps—to blogs and websites.
A nuance that words cannot quite capture, a sentence you hesitated to write because it might sound too formal—place a character beside it, and the same text suddenly feels much more like you, and much more sincere.
The habit of reaching for an emoji whenever words did not feel like enough can now continue on your own blog.
