Emoji bullets that never belonged in the spec
I can date some drafts to the month by the emoji. Launch phase gets a rocket. Insights get a lightbulb. Next steps get a checkbox. The words under the pictures are often fine. The pictures are how a chat product decorated a list so it would look like a slide.
Pattern 18 in REhume is blunt: remove emojis. I agree for anything I would put in git, print, or send to a lawyer. I disagree for a birthday Slack. Genre first.
Where they come from
Chat UIs reward scannable, colorful answers. Models learned that a heading with a pictograph scores as “helpful.” When you ask for a migration plan, you get a poster.
Before: a launch heading with a rocket, a key-insight heading with a lightbulb, a next-steps heading with a checkmark.
After: The product launches in Q3. User research showed a preference for simplicity. Next step: schedule a follow-up meeting.
Same information, no clip art.
What I keep
Emoji in quoted UI copy stays if the product actually shows that glyph. A bug report that says the button displays a warning sign should mention the warning sign. I do not strip evidence.
I also leave emoji in documents that are about emoji, including this one, when I am naming the thing. I still do not sprinkle them into headings for mood.
How I edit
I scan headings and list markers first. Those are the noisy hits. Inline emoji in a sentence (“ship it”) is rarer and often a human. I do not have a perfect rule; I have a bias: if the emoji is doing the job of a heading level or a bullet, it is decoration.
REhume’s deterministic pass removes them. If I needed one, I add it back on purpose. Accidental reintroduction is how a “clean” README grows rockets again after the next chat round.
Accessibility and diffs
Screen readers announce many emoji by name. A heading that begins with a rocket becomes “rocket launch phase,” which is not the heading you wrote. Git diffs become unreadable when every list marker is a different codepoint.
Those are practical reasons, not aesthetics. I can live with a human who likes a single emoji in a changelog. I cannot live with a twelve-item list where each item is a different pictograph and a bold label.
Neighbors
Emoji lists usually arrive with boldface overuse and inline-header lists. The full costume is: emoji, bold label, colon, restatement of the label. Convert to prose or to a boring Markdown list with no bold.
They also travel with title case headings. The slide deck wants Title Case and a glyph. A document wants sentence case and a verb.
Practice
Export a chat answer. Turn every emoji heading into a plain heading. If a line becomes empty, it was only a picture. If the line still works, you never needed the picture.
Then read the page at 80% zoom, as if you were on a phone. Emoji that looked friendly on a wide monitor look like noise in a pull request on a laptop in the sun.
The pattern encyclopedia is the rule. This page is why I run it before I argue about tone.