photo from Reddit user Urfarah
You’ve seen it on the internet; probably Tumblr. It’s annoying to say the least. The only people who use it are teenagers or those who think role playing is a viable sport. I’m talking about descriptive texting and it’s a plague on the texting community.
Descriptive texting is the act where asterisks are placed around a word in a sentence in order to provide emphasis. They’re the pretend italics of the texting world. Worse yet, you can put them around a phrase that is describing what the person is doing. Such an act would look like this: “*dances around in front of the door*” or “*collapses from embarrassment*.”
This is real. This is dumb. And it’s going on far too often. It's also known as "asterisk action."