Deconstructing Emoticons

A writer acquaintance who I am following on Twitter and who I introduced in my blog as the caretaker of #6words told me that I am not supposed to deconstruct emoticons. Which naturally got me to thinking. Why do we deconstruct any writing in the first place?

It has been a long time since I have taken a writing class, but it seems to me that we ought to take writing as it stands. Sure, we need to understand the time period in which it was written. We might even need to understand what state the...