Andrew Carlsen, 41, a multimedia producer in Washington, has noticed how the overuse of exclamation points at his office is affecting his own writing.
“There is definitely peer pressure to use more than I feel is maybe always appropriate,” he said. “If I’m explaining something and there’s four different thoughts, and every one of them is followed by an exclamation point, I’m just like, this is ridiculous. But then it’s like, which one do I remove?”
Mr. Carlsen recalled a “happy birthday” group email chain among co-workers a few months ago: Between the subject and the body of the email, someone had used 14 exclamation points.
“I just thought, that’s a lot,” he said.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald supposedly said that using an exclamation point was like laughing at your own joke. But surely Happy Birthday deserves one, if not fourteen.
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