Editor extraordinaire Gill Wing explores the history of the exclamation mark and gives her verdict on whether to use it in your business writing

‘Hi there! Great to hear from you!’ Have you noticed how upbeat everyone sounds on email? As if we were all teetering on the edge of hysteria, rather than soporifically slumped over our laptops, trying to clear our inboxes. Women are especially keen to appear perky, studies have shown, liberally scattering our online interactions with that universal signifier of friendly intention: the exclamation mark.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. After all, it derived from the Latin word ‘io’, which was added to the end of a sentence to convey joy, much like the modern ‘Hooray!’ Over time, the ‘i’ moved above the ‘o’, the ‘o’ became a dot and – hey presto! – a new form of punctuation was born.

But there’s a reason journalists refer to the exclamation mark as a “screamer”, a “gasper” or a “startler”, and some publications ban it outright: it lacks subtlety. It’s the linguistic equivalent of a big pointy foam finger. In professional writing, respect its brute force and use it sparingly or fall foul of style guru H W Fowler, who cautioned: “Excessive use of exclamation marks is a certain indication of an unpractised writer, or of one who wants to add a dash of spurious sensation to something unsensational.”

Granted, some esteemed authors do use them in abundance – James Joyce averaged 1,100 in every 100,000 words – but, unless you’re confident you’re writing an opus destined to be the next Ulysses, defer to F Scott Fitzgerald, who didn’t pull any punches when it came to what American secretaries used to call the “bang”: “Cut out all exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke.” 

Need further convincing? Heed Ben Blatt, writing in The Guardian: “I went through tens of thousands of examples on FanFiction.net, where authors create stories in the Harry Potter or Twilight universes. These authors, writing for fun and without editors, use [exclamation marks] at almost four times the rate of the writer of a novel that ends up on The New York Times bestseller list.” 

Here’s my advice for business writers: if your organisation is headquartered in Devon’s Westward Ho!, Canada’s Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha! or the Czech Republic’s Ostrava!!!, you have an excuse; otherwise, the exclamation mark should have no place on your page.

Based in London, Gill Wing is a regular contributor to Realwords projects and has 20 years’ editorial experience on some of the UK’s most-read newspapers, magazines, books, websites and apps.