I chose to begin my emoji synopsis with the title as it is integral to the book I was trying to depict and is mentioned repeatedly throughout the novel itself. I also felt that it could provide the reader of my emoji writing context for the rest of the piece and make it more likely that they would be able to interpret the book that I had chosen.

I didn’t choose the piece specifically because it would be easy to visualize, although I feel comfortable saying that I believe some pieces would be easier to communicate about through this manner than others. I don’t believe that this was an exceptionally hard story to depict because there were several key aspects to the story that stand out and make it more easily recognizable, like the nationality of each character. It also has a very busy plot with changes in setting that could be relatively easily depicted. There were a lot of key events to choose from in describing the plot of the novel and the less easily depicted ones could be glossed over without impacting the overall efficacy of the synopsis. A harder text or TV show to represent would likely have been one that takes place in a single location and relies more on dialogue and emotion than action and changes of setting. Bolter describes that “the history of western prose might be understood as a series of strategies for controlling the visual and the sensory” (Bolter, 2001). Written text is uniquely positioned to control the visual elements of the story and provide depth and clarity in a way that emojis, as a basic representative visual language, are not suited for. It is also completely non-functional in being able to describe sensory aspects that transcend the visual narrative of stories. In an emoji story, a visual must also represent touch, smell and taste, which is limiting when there is standard way to modify the function of each emoji.

As I created this emoji story I realized that I had started categorizing the function of the emojis I was using into the following categories:

1. Setting Emoji
2. Action Emoji
3. Person/ Noun Emoji
4. Verb Emoji
5. Adjective emoji
6. Tone Emoji
7. Emotion Emoji

When creating this emoji synopsis, I initially considered the setting of the original piece and tried to give a sense of place to each section of my emoji narrative, before placing noun emojis around them that would clarify the events that took place. When trying to represent specific characters I used consistent person emojis to stand in as adjectives in order to differentiate one character from another and tried to use different emojis to represent characters of the same gender. When placing these adjective emojis, they were originally quite scattered, some being placed before emojis representing nouns, like in English and some after, like in French. I eventually moved them all before emojis representing nouns for the sake of consistency and ease of recognition of different characters. This also served to structure the text in a way that would be familiar in terms of English grammar to make it more “legible” for most readers in the class. The main character was the only one that I used different versions of the woman emoji to represent, as the person emoji could be changed to show her character development and role throughout the book.

Verbs were the hardest part of the story to represent through emojis, as these were often linked to a depiction of a person undertaking this action. This proved challenging as this was not in keeping with the structure I had already set up for identifying key characters. These active person emojis often ended up seeming redundant and I opted to limit the use of human shaped emojis for use as verbs. Additionally, many violent actions that needed to be depicted in order to relay the plot are not present in the emoji selection.

As I refined my emoji synopsis I began to rely less exclusively on representing specific words with pictures, as the selection was quite limited, and added emojis that depicted the tone of the story, such as blood drops or skulls. I limited the number of “emotion” emojis in order to avoid confusion between the characters themselves and the emotions being depicted, which could belong to the reader or the character. Bolter summarizes the difficulties in communicating a narrative in this style: “The picture elements extend over a broad range of verbal meanings: each element means too much rather than too little” (Bolter 2001). The emoji story is like a combination of charades and Pictionary where the reader has far too much power to misinterpret. They have to ask themselves if the picture is literal or symbolic, and if it is symbolic, which of the many possible symbols could it represent. The lack of standard grammatical rules for the emoji lexicon also proved to be challenging, as every person writing in emojis needs to tailor the order of the images to fit their own idea of grammatical structure.

References:

Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. doi:10.4324/9781410600110