How useful would semiotics be for you as a writer?

Exit, pursued by a bear, presaging the offstage death of Antigonus

A line, or rather a stage direction in Shakespeare’s the Winter’s Tale demonstrates how useful semiotics are in writing.

Like how one makes a connection by involving the other person, Shakespare’s visual of a bear on stage asks the reader complete the picture. Understanding how the audience or reads signs, can help writers manipulate the communication for dramatic and style purposes.

In understanding how things are to be interpreted, the writer needs to be sensitive or empathetic towards the read. Writing is an act of inscription that often supports construction. By being conscious of semiotics the writer can make use of the readers existing understanding of meanings through signs making it a possible route of connecting with them.

Of course the reverse could also take place here; in re-thinking the signs, a writer can form something new and unexpected to give the reader a fresh perspective or insight on something ordinary. This can be in seen in situational comedies, like a bunch of 20 something friends in a city, Friends, or having in-laws as neighbours, Everybody Loves Raymond . Reading against givens, norms and natural opens up new space within the expected to accommodate the personal and immediate.

Semiotics is tentative rather than definitive. Even the best writing is still a pitch that needs to be caught. Not being entirely reckless at it helps but there are other influences like individual experience or culture differences that plays a part between the relationship of signs and how it is understood.

Charles Pierce said that, every thought is a sign thus every writer, at every word – written or unwritten - gives out signs that are to be interpreted by the reader to make out meaning. I guess whether consciously or otherwise semiotics is at the crux of what the writer does. Important it is then.