Modern Grammar: The Obligatory Exclamation

"Thanks for the email!" Whee, ha ha, woo!

Use too few and you can come off as grumpy, humorless, or just not a team player. Too many, and you can look dumb or manic. Such is the sad reality of the exclamation point in modern business communication.

Some business writers recommend a few writing techniques to limit exclamation-point use, including the use of emoticons and emoji. That’s ironic, because back in the day, exclamation points more or less were emoji.

Most punctuation didn’t really get its start until the invention of the printing press standardized certain practices. Before that, a few scribes from the late Middle Ages used the interjection “io” at the end of sentences to indicate joy, or more generally, surprise or excitement. Like a lot of other things that were rolled out with positive associations, io got tied to a lot of other extreme emotions, but not before it started getting condensed into a sign that was less and less easy to parse as a pair of letters:

Among other things, this means that certain action-packed classics like Beowulf, The Iliad, El Cid, and the Epic of Gilgamesh did not have access to the exclamation mark at all. I’ve seen at least one Iliad translation interject them, though that’s surely a controversial practice.

Others works of classic lit might lean on the exclamation point too little—F. Scott Fitzgerald compared its usage to laughing at your own joke—or too much: Alice in Wonderland is famously stuffed with “!,” to the point where it doesn’t intensify so much as get caught up in the background.

A lot of the comics I read in my youth had a similar “exclamation pox.” This was partly a leftover practice from the early days of comics printing, in which an ending period could sometimes disappear in reproduction, as it was just a small dot. But by the early days of Marvel, holding onto this practice was no longer a necessity but a choice.

Compare this scene from the most recent Fantastic Four, in which Ben Grimm sticks up for his friend and teammate Johnny. The comic as a whole has plenty of exclamation points—Ben and Johnny spend most of it in comedic, squabbly competition with each other, with lots of overheated dialogue to match. But confining this speech to one exclamation point (joined with a question mark in “Y’know what, Chet?!”) makes it read as “quiet yet loud,” which suits the moment.

(Is this a backdoor way for me to lavish even more praise on Ryan North’s scripts, which have rocketed Fantastic Four to being my favorite mainstream comic month after month after month? Well, it’s not not that.)

The rules for exclamation points get more complicated when you consider foreign language speakers, some of whom you might interact with in international business or just everyday life. French, for example, puts a space before the exclamation mark as well as after, and uses it the same ways we do but also to indicate any command, even a soft, quiet one, as in “Please sit !” German likewise uses exclamation points for soft commands, and you can imagine how that practice, if improperly translated, could lead English speakers to misread the level of urgency.

Knowing when to use this mark is an art, and there’s no easy rule that covers all situations. But don’t worry too much! Just do your best to match the tone you’re seeing in other friendly messages, and odds are you’ll do okay. Friendly people forgive.

Just remember: there’s only one Jackie McLean.