Cocktails and Records

How do you feel about exclamation marks?

I read something about exclamation marks in the Guardian yesterday which helped me understand my hypocritical relationship with them.

You see, at work I spend quite a bit of my time deleting them from other people’s writing. I have even written a fascist style guide outlawing them except under all but the most extenuating circumstances. At work, I think exclamation marks look puppy doggishly over-excited, unprofessional and hyperbolic. ‘Six out of ten of our visitors think that the new pot plants look great!’. Indeed.

But at home, at home… exclamation marks are my guilty secret. They litter my emails and hand written notes (‘Remember to buy bread!’) and I battle to keep them out of this blog. On dark days, I even use double and triple exclamation marks.

However, as Stuart Jeffries article notes, this is because exclamation marks are friendly. They add emotion and friendliness to a plain old boring dull sentence. I’d like to think that this theory explains away my addiction to exclamation marks in my private life.

Work is another matter though, and I feel increasingly alone in my raging against the exclamation mark in the workplace. I fear what will happen when exclamation marks take over the world of work. When you’re free to shamelessly use an exclamation mark in the work domain, where do you go next for that added touch of friendliness outside of it? It’s like swear words losing their impact through over-use.

If we don’t act now to stop the rise of exclamation marks in the professional world, there’s a good chance we’ll be using emoticons in every day written language in a few years time and I’ll be deleting them from work reports not long after that.

Terrible !! ;)

Tags: language matters

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 30th, 2009 at 4:30 pm and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.