Happy National Punctuation Day, people. My position on exclamation point (over)use is a strong and closely-held one, as evidenced by this low-quality jpeg, mercilessly ripped from a ten-member-strong Facebook group that shares my sentiment. Fitzgerald said it best, as he so often did: “Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own jokes.” And yet, here we are (!)
How about a little Scientific Research on the subject? According to Kees van den Bos, a professor in the Department of Social and Organizational Psychology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands:
“‘People are affected strongly by these kinds of punctuation marks,’ said Van den Bos, who conducted studies on the impact exclamation marks and flashing lights have on the justice judgment process. His research, published online by the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2008, found that exposure to exclamation points reduces response times and exaggerates judgments. People took less time to determine whether a situation was fair or unfair and their justice judgment calls were more extreme.
… Exclamation points activated the medial prefrontal cortex – an area of the brain that becomes activated when people are processing information that is very emotional and perhaps alarming, he said. ‘You are really processing much faster than when you didn’t see an exclamation mark,’ he said.”
+ Psychology, spam! and exclamation points (IT World Canada)
And also:
+ So Many Exclamation Points! (Slate, 2007)
+ Gender and the Use of Exclamation Points in Computer-Mediated Communication: An Analysis of Exclamations Posted to Two Electronic Discussion Lists (Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 2006)
+ Anti-exclamation mark overuse key!!! (Halfbakery, 2001)
