A friend of mine with an interest in linguistics used to teach an intro to natural language processing to undergraduate IT students. Her first example was the difficulty of understanding the sentence made up of the four words in the title of this blog entry. When she first spoke the sentence, the room broke up with laughter - she'd just discovered another sense she hadn't considered: its absurdity.
I don't want to go through all of the possibilities of context, reference, emphasis, tone, & non-verbal cues, but suffice to say that those four words can probably produce twenty meanings.
Just a simple comparison of similar scenes ...
A group of mixed gender ("he" & "she" are present with witnesses). Someone, I shall call them "the accused" mutters "HE made her duck", referring to a co-accused, say.
Same group, but this time the accused points a finger at one of the others & utters those fateful words "HE made her duck!" In this latter scenario, the speaker is not as likely to be the accused.
Same words, same intent, different tone & context, & very different results.
In these two examples, I have used capitals to provide for emphasis - trying to indicate to my audience that the word "he" is important in the speech (spoken as if stressed), or rather important in the sentence produced by the speaker (as important to the speaker).
This is a clumsy way of portraying the spoken word, you have to agree. Especially so if there are other non-verbal cues that come together to give the full meaning, or there are a variety of cues to give different meaning in the same sentence.
An example of this is identity. In a mixed group of people, our favourite sentence includes one female (she who has been ducked) & one male (he who did the ducking - whatever that may be). The question arises as to how to explain, say, the difference between getting one of the protagonists wrong & both.
In the former case, "HE made her duck" might be construed as meaning "you have the wrong ducker", but "HE made HER duck" might well mean that you have the wrong pair of people entirely, or that there was another pair of ducker/duckee involved somewhere in which there is general confusion.
My point is that the written language completely fails to provide enough cues to give an understanding of what the intention of the writer is.
We need such a mechanism, & I don't know how the written language has survived for so long without it. There have been some attempts to use capitalisation within words to show stress, but this doesn't work in general use. Similarly, capitalisation of the first letter of a word, which used to denote a noun, has dwindled to only the proper noun, so that doesn't seem to be favoured.
In literal writing, underlining works, but it fell out of favour when typewriters were replaced with simple text or messages, where underlining is painful. On that theme, however, the use of the underscore to mark a word or phrase as emphasised _like this_ just might be enough as the first step to standardising non-verbal cues in writing.
Then, once we know who made whose duck (or who made whom duck), we can get to tossing out the calligraphy that emojis have become & concentrate on the simple emoticons. *<8*)