If there is any feeling to be found in the joyless brick of human knowledge that we call the smartphone, certainly, it lives in our punctuation. On a rainy Monday morning, I found myself thinking, as ...

We have already covered the difficult question of how to use emojis in the workplace. Now I will be leading you through an advanced course on whether or not you should use exclamation points. But ...

I had an English professor in college who once explained why we should never use exclamation points. “Let the words in the sentence convey the intensity,” he said. “Not the exclamation point.” The ...

In an essay published in 1895 called “How to Tell a Story,” Mark Twain chastised writers who use “whooping exclamation-points” that reveal them laughing at their own humor, “all of which is very ...

The only literary work about punctuation I'm aware of is an odd early story by Anton Chekhov called "The Exclamation Mark." After getting into an argument with a colleague about punctuation, a school ...

I am on a mission to limit my use of the exclamation point in my writing. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time and I imagine I am not alone. It seems that every statement, announcement, social ...

Exclamation points used to be a rare signal of extreme intensity. Now they're everywhere, from news headlines to business emails and text messages. Thanks to our smartphone-obsessed culture, the ...

I was scanning the first draft of an all-staff office memo I had written the other day, trying to strike the just-right balance between exuberance and self-dignity. I reserved the most scrutiny for my ...