14 DAY TRIAL // Written communication has long suffered from losing much of the non-verbal communication that a face-to-face talk expresses. This has only gotten worse with the proliferation of online communication. People have adapted, leading to the invention and adoption of the wonderful emoticons that have made instant messaging, email, not to mention online message boards, so much more colorful and interesting.
Yet, this too isn't enough to express the full range of emotions and witty subtext that most people are more than capable of in real life. Countless studies have found that a large percentage of the population regularly finds itself incapable of getting its great yet understated sense of humor across and that email recipients frequently miss out on the more subtle points leading to awkward situations or, unfortunately, to people being offended by perfectly innocent remarks. In extreme cases, it may even lead to some thinking that their co-workers' sense of humor was less developed than it clearly was. An urgent solution was called upon, as this needed to stop.
Thankfully, all that is behind us, as a US company has come up with an ingenious solution to this real conundrum, the SarcMark, a new punctuation mark described as "a squiggle around a dot" and designed to indicate, what else, sarcasm. Taking cues from words like 'sarcasm' and 'exclamation mark' in its naming, this latest development in written representations of rhetorical devices aims to revolutionize online communications in a way not seen since the creation of the ':)'.
It is not the first attempt at solving this pressing issue, either offline or online. Throughout history, there have been several attempts, as the scholars at Wikipedia would attest to, leading to more recent developments such as the pseudo-HTML tag </sarcasm>. SarcMark's simplicity and ease of use make it stand out as a clear leader in the field. The SarcMark is available for Windows PCs, Macs and BlackBerry mobile devices ensuring that no email, blog comment, internal memo or PowerPoint presentation goes misunderstood again. Likely the product of years of research and development, SarcMark can be yours for the low price of $1.99, which guarantees a lifetime use. The company's own instructional material is provided below for your convenience.