Exclamation Points: A Redemption Story

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Ah, yes, exclamation points (!).

You want to use them, but you don’t want to use them.

You feel pressured to have them in every email and text. A salutation has to be followed by one: Hello! Simple statements get three, even four: Can’t wait to see you!!!! 

You use them even though you don’t feel that enthusiastic that often. 

They leave you feeling empty when someone else doesn’t return your exclamation points, as if you’ve run breathless, waving to greet someone who may or may not be as happy to see you. 

You hear rumors that exclamation points are gendered and want no part of that. They’re supposedly symbols of girlish gushiness, and women are expected to deploy them more often than men. 

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Until this year, I never used exclamation points. (Italics intended.)

I was a holdout, the last of my kind. Even if I was excited, I didn’t hit the shift key and let my ring finger stretch to the upper left of the QWERTY keyboard—ping!—lest I infuse my words with a cringey unseriousness.

They seemed indulgent—shouting and in shouting, demanding attention. They cried out with emotion (Love you!). Were too excitable (Yes!). Urgent when there was no urgency (You won’t believe this!). People pleasing in the extreme (This is great!).

I would have quoted F. Scott Fitzgerald, who said they’re self-conscious, “like laughing at your own joke.”

I would have told you that Elmore Leonard was being very generous when he advised writers to use no more than two or three exclamation points in 100,000 words.

I prohibited my undergrads from using them not just in their midterms and finals but in all correspondence. (Academia is no place for exclamation points—not even in email.) Standing behind the podium at the front of the room, I informed them that they were permitted five—five!—exclamation points in their lifetimes. Total.

They laughed. I didn’t.

Their emails seemed absurd: Hi, professor! When’s the final due? Thanks! (The due date was on the syllabus and I had said it several times in class, but that’s another issue.)

I was teaching them to be professional. Adult. Serious.

Anne Helen Petersen

’s call to reclaim the modern punctuation mark in “A Theory of the Modern Exclamation Point! Doing the Work of Tone” would have struck me as misguided at best and just plain wrong at worst. She argues that yes, exclamation points are gendered and yes, they’re a tonal “performance of niceness” in the workplace and yes, they pretty much obliterate any authority a woman might be trying to have. But we can all claim our own “exclamation style” and communicate in a way that feels true.

No, I would have said. No.

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I don’t remember the exact moment I became an ardent exclamation-point user, but the shift occurred around the time I recovered from serious mental illness. 

Before then, I felt no need to show my excitement or make people feel like I was excited about them or something they did. I was busy battling demons and darkness. The energy it would have taken to generate a symbolic, unbridled yes! at the end of a sentence when there was no yes! in my life was too much. 

But when I got well, I had more energy and was less disconnected and no longer trapped inside my own mind and wanted to be with people the way people are with other people, puctuationally. 

The transition from exclamation-point abstainer to borderline-exclamation-point abuser was thrilling (in an anthropological way) and deeply uncomfortable. With each !, I felt all the things: girlish, unserious, unprofessional, dumb. It wasn’t just cringey; I actually cringed. 

But when I used them in emails and texts—particularly to other women—they seemed necessary and not in a bad way. A kind of girl-pact that said we speak the same symbols.  

In emails, I united with my sisters, unafraid of girlish gushiness and it felt right. I existed—and still exist—in a state of low-level positivity most of the time anyway. It was as if twenty-five years of serious mental illness sucked all the negativity from me. Not to mention the fact that surviving chronic suicidality kind of puts life in perspective. Even when things aren’t good, they’re still, well, pretty damn good.

Then there was the exclamation point’s history. Like women, it had to fight for equal rights. It didn’t have its own key on the QWERTY keyboard until 1970. Before that, those who wanted to give the exclamation point its due had to type a period (.), backspace, and then type an apostrophe (’.) to get something that didn’t look much like an exclamation point at all but was considered fine likely because, come on, in light of World Wars and nuclear threats, it probably didn’t seem important to get it exactly right.

There were times when I wanted to go back to a life without all that yes! I worried I might—at any moment—descend into ALL CAPS. (I’m currently on the slippery all-caps slope, having used them several times in the past few months.) 

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But then I discovered that exclamation points aren’t, in fact, measures of excitement. All those people condemning them as insidious trappings of people-pleasing performances of niceness have it wrong. 

The prevailing theory is that the exclamation point was derived from the Latin word io in the fifteenth century. Supposedly (though the motivation for this isn’t clear), some Roman guy started writing the I (Romans wrote in all caps) over the O; the O shrank by degrees, eventually giving us a line and a dot (!). 

That symbol (!) represented the word Io.

But Io has nothing to do with excitement, encouragement, pleasing, or niceness.

Io means joy. Joy.

The exclamation point should more accurately be called the joy point, as in I’m full of joy that this moment exists.

Joy, not giddy excitement. Like happiness, excitement is a fleeting high; joy is that low-level positivity I mentioned. It can occur in tandem with grief, alongside uncertainty, during respites of dread. Sure, it might come out as an exclamation, but joy can just be there, sustained, expressed at will with the tap of the keyboard.

Exclamation points were and still are off-limits in my “real writing” except when used ironically or quieted by parentheses. (See above.)

But maybe—just maybe—we women, those of us who use and overuse and abuse joy points, are onto something.

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