Elmore Leonard wrote of exclamation marks: “You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.” Which means, on average, an exclamation mark every book and a half.

If I use two exclamation marks, it will show I’m really excited.” And so it goes. We end up with a double, triple, and even quadruple exclaim to punctuate a simple thank you.

Maybe you read an exclamation point as shouting when it was intended to be friendly. When it comes to texting, there can be plenty of tonal confusion, especially among people of different generations.

As a recovering exclamation-mark addict, I decided to dig deeper into the roles–good, bad, and somewhere in between–that this common piece of punctuation plays in our working lives.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once declared that using an exclamation point was like laughing at your own joke, but linguist Geoff Nunberg begs to differ. He has begun embracing the mark in his own writing.

In my emails, this behaviour manifests itself as exclamation marks. Preoccupied with appearing nice, I used to catch myself using exclamations at the end of every other sentence.

Question marks and exclamation marks go at the end of a sentence and they tell us what type of sentence it is. Using different sentence types helps makes your writing more interesting. In Jackie ...

As Melissa Dahl points out on New York magazine's The Science of Us blog, "The exclamation mark, once reserved for expressing joy or excitement, now simply marks baseline politeness (a fact ...

Elmore Leonard has died at the age of 87. The crime novelist really didn't like exclamation marks, notes Finlo Rohrer. His 10 rules of writing, external from 2001 are arguably as famous as any of ...