POW!!! A Bold Case for Adding New Forms of Expressive Punctuation to Our Written Language

The write stuff

It’s ironic that a culture unschooled in the art of writing is once again so heavily dependent on the written word for communication. My generation had to nourish long-distance relationships with letters in the 70’s because phone calls were still too expensive. I recall feverishly scribbling my news on crisp onionskin stationery and dispatching a few thin sheets via airmail, the affordable alternative to talk. Penmanship gave letters a unique sort of intimacy. My fingers tingle as I think of it.

Phone calls had a good three-decade run. They added spontaneity and immediacy to communication, in our personal lives and in business. But now it’s rare to call anyone (except those close to you) without an appointment unless you’re trying to reach a help desk. We do most of our “speaking” in email – quickly but not always clearly. (How often have you urged someone: “Just get on the phone and talk to her, already?”  But spontaneous phone calls are a thing of the past, now that calls have been upgraded to “meetings.”

Stephen King’s Pet Cemetery is my personal metaphor for dead cultural trends that return, against great odds — always with a peculiar, potentially sinister twist. When old-fashioned correspondence died, it came back as email. Not quite letters, something else. A reincarnation that’s both hauntingly familiar and curiously different, tough for even the most adept writers to manage.

You are what you email

Like any dark dependency, email is both vilified and cherished. Everyone agrees that there’s way too much of it, often unsolicited and unwelcome, and always demanding a rapid response. Fake urgency is the cadence of modern life. Our psychomotor skills are simply not up to it.

Summoned to attention, we root around in our heads for words like mis-matched socks in a messy drawer, reenacting errors we thought we’d shed back in grade school (it’s/its, bear/bare). Even autocorrect cannot shield us from those petty humiliations.

But typos and dumb errors are not the half of it. The big challenge is content ― how to say exactly what we mean without giving offense. It’s hard to be clear and expressive in writing, and email is an especially impoverished medium. While meant to function as spoken dialogue (where intonation can matter more than word choice), email is flat and voiceless. We can’t hear what we’ve written, and we don’t necessarily know how to interpret what’s written back. Even a simple request like “please send it to me” can sound imperious.  

And then there’s the pain of delayed response. While we know rationally that everyone’s inbox is managed by triage, it’s easy to over-interpret silence as evidence we’ve not been nice enough or likeable enough to deserve a response. To compensate, we offer lots of well-wishes powered up by the mighty, now indispensable, exclamation point. Hope you’re well!  Have a great weekend!  Let me know!  These Marvel Comic “punch-lines” are now ubiquitous in email – functioning not as signs of aggression so much as reassurance of good intentions.

The original power point

Its origins are not entirely clear. The prevailing theory – which is to say, the theory that seems to have picked up more internet reverb than any other ― traces the exclamation point to the Latin symbol for jubilation, a dot followed by a dash. (I note, for the record, that one 19th century expert on the history of printing dismissed that theory as imaginative folklore.) Another plausible thesis attributes the exclamation point to early music notation. Regardless, historians of punctuation would agree that by the 15th century, it was established as a symbol of emphasis, and for 500 years, it remained so. An exclamation point brooked no challenge. Jubilant or not, it has always served as a signal of force, urgency, and conviction. Pay attention! I mean it, no kidding!

From power to submission

While Google Ngrams can give us some insight into the use of punctuation in literature, there are no publicly available data on contemporary trends in the use of exclamation marks in “private” correspondence. (Surely the masters of artificial intelligence at Google know every jot and emoji in our gmails but they do not share those data.) The Victorians were apparently prodigious users of the mark, often to signal admiration or wonderment, but its use subsided in the 20th century, only to see a resurgence in the 21st with the advent of texting. Now, exclamation points are attached to every good wish we extend in email. That’s great! So nice to hear from you! Enjoy your vacation! Without them, good wishes would seem anemic or insincere. Exclamation points are the heart and the voice of our emails.

But then something else happened. The exclamation mark got pressed into service as a signal of submissiveness. It’s now attached to every email ask or acknowledgment of appreciation – even when not much appreciation is required. (Please let me know if that time would work for you. Thanks! Looking forward to seeing that as soon as possible! I’ll have it for you by tomorrow!) These exclamation points are no longer exultant and powerful. They merely seek to avoid giving offense. Try as I might, I can’t manage to type the word, “thanks,” without an exclamation point. Without it, a thank-you sounds, well, pointless. Ungrateful. Even mildly hostile.

Giving voice to written ideas

Few turns of phrase can ever replace the miraculous expressiveness of the human voice (or face), which means that, in a world where so much of what we say must be written, the exclamation point is forced to shoulder extra burden. That’s clearly why we secretly yearn for social permission to use emojis in our emails when we’re kidding. (Admit it, you do!) In text messages, there is the privilege of inserting a wink or an eye roll that’s worth a dozen words and a wallop of emotional meaning. But in business emails, the use of emojis can seem gauche. So, we need the exclamation point to express not just gratitude, but humor and irony too. (Biking in the Alps was great, thanks, but now I need another vacation to recover!)  How many jobs can one little notation handle? As marketers would say, there is clear evidence of unmet need.

Saying and meaning it

For a very long time, the emotional valence of our written words generally could be understood without extra notation. The basic requirements were a few stop lights and arrows to manage the traffic ― primarily the period, the comma, and the double-dash. (Technically speaking, we don’t require even the question mark. We have word order to signal when a question is being asked.)  

But digital writing needs more signage. We are producing too many words, too quickly, for people who don’t have the time or context to interpret them properly. And for the “foreseeable future” (if that concept still has meaning), we are bound to produce many more written words per finger, per day, than any of us ― authors and readers alike ― can handle.

Since the digital world is bent on changing so many of the things I personally liked about the English language – largely in ways that dull and degrade it ― I would like to make a case for embracing, perhaps formalizing, a few useful enhancements. Ignore the scolds and the punctuation police. Let those exclamation points and emojis fly! If we bother to retain the question mark, why then should we not also have marks to let people know when we’re kidding? Or to reassure them we are earnestly grateful?

And grateful is what I most assuredly am. Anyone who has read this through to the very last line of text here really deserves my undying gratitude. A full-throated, three-mark, thank-you!!! I hope you know I mean it.