A picture is worth a thousand words, and an emoticon is worth even more since it expresses the feelings which is almost impossible to do in words. So no matter you wanna show anger or express love , using emoticons is a great :idea: !
Most of us use emoticons while chatting, but are unaware that Gmail has a rich set of emoticons in its in built rich text editor,
So whenever you are short of words to express yourself in the messages, use the emoticons.