GOING A MONTH WITHOUT USING EXCLAMATION POINTS. I posted here a couple months ago about an article by Katherine Bindley in the Wall Street Journal on the difficulty of a decision not to to use an exclamation point in an e mail, especially a business e mail. Not using an exclamation can well be interpreted as a negative, turning what is meant as praise into disapproval. The linguist Deborah Tannen says that only women are expected to use exclamation points. For a woman boss, too few exclamation points and she can seem hard and unfeeling; too many and she lacks gravitas.
Wallace cites the chief operating officer of Zillow, who says that she limits herself to one or two exclamation points to an e mail paragraph. (!!!) (My exclamation points are meant to express astonishment that women are expected to use exclamation points that often.)
Now, Nikki Waller writes, also in the Journal (October 23). about her experiment of not using any exclamation point in an e mail for a period of 30 days. She says it may have made her a better manager. I can see from the substitutions she made for punctuation marks how expressing thoughts with full sentences, using the telephone or even walking personally to somebody’s desk may have been better than using exclamation points.