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Encoding Nonverbal Communication in Writing

First posted on November 15, 2021

¿Who else thinks that Spanish is a cool language? Unlike English, they have a symbol that tells readers that the following sentence is a question. Isn't that refreshing? That one symbol conveys so much tonal information and makes the writing sound more genuine and conversational. So I wondered if we could use other ligatures to communicate tonal details.

English writing cannot convey upward and downward inflections, which are changes in pitch on vowels. Inflections are essential in speech because they communicate one's intent.

But what exactly are they?

Well, an upward inflection is when you increase the pitch of a vowel for the current syllable. And vice versa for downward inflections.

Here are some examples of inflections:

  • Upwards inflection: "Yes, I'm... sure?" (The upwards inflection on the character 'e' turns the sentence into a question)
  • Downwards inflection: "Yes, I'm sure." (the inflection makes you sound more confident)
  • Upwards inflection: "Johnny?"
  • Downwards inflection: "Johhny." (A more strict tone)

So how might we encode these inflections in speech?

  1. Use accents: "Yes, I'm suré" (upwards) vs "Yes, I'm surè" (downwards)
  2. Use underlines/overlines: "Johnny̅" (upwards) vs "Johnny" (downwards)

I prefer the underline encoding because it doesn't overload any existing characters, and you can also vary the thickness of the underline to convey how strong the inflection was.

Manually adding these inflections would take a lot of work, so we would need to use a computer program tool to add these inflections into voice transcriptions automatically. I think that it'd be a pretty fun hackathon project :)

I honestly wish that we could encode more nonverbal communication in writing. Hopefully, we can reach a point where writing can fully convey someone's intent as if you were speaking to them on the phone. And that's about it, so I hope you have a great week!

- Curtis

P.S. Thank you so much for being here after 75 newsletters! I honestly didn't think I'd still be writing this when I found out how hard it was at the start. So thank you so so much for all of your encouragement.

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