Do exclamation points make prose friendlier? This is one of many questions Stuart Jeffries explores in "The Joy of Exclamation Marks!" in The Guardian (read it here). Surveying changing attitudes toward this most excitable piece of punctuation, Jeffries quotes a Terry Pratchett character who considers excessive use of exclamation points "A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head."
"There are lots of people these days with figurative underpants on their heads," asserts Jeffries, blaming the trend on online communication styles. Jeffries notes a study that determined that women tend to use exclamation points more than men because the exclamation point conveys friendliness. "When, though," asks Jeffries, "did friendliness become the arbiter of orthographic etiquette? There is surely a point after which exclamation marks no longer express friendliness."
My favorite comment on exclamation points comes from the late Lewis Thomas, who wrote, in "On Punctuation,"
Exclamation points are the most irritating of all. Look! they say, look at what I just said! How amazing is my thought! It is like being forced to watch someone else's small child jumping up and down crazily in the center of the living room shouting to attract attention. If a sentence really has something of importance to say, something quite remarkable, it doesn't need a mark to point it out. And if it is really, after all, a banal sentence needing more zing, the exclamation point simply emphasizes its banality!
Couldn't have said it better myself!
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