EXCLAMATION POINTS AND E MAIL. Katherine Bindley had an article in the Wall Street Journal (August 4, 2018) about the dilemmas that occur in trying to decide whether to or not to put an exclamation point at the end of a sentence. Her story includes examples where recipients felt that the absence of an exclamation point conveyed disapproval. One example is of a person who mistakenly felt that her boss was angry and might fire her because there was no exclamation point in the boss’s short message “That’s fine.”
There was only a period.
The article cites a study of 126 college students which “found that ending sentences with periods in a text was interpreted as abrupt and insincere.”