Just use an exclamation mark!

A grammarian re-examination.

My son, who’s 9, has, due to a sizable gift from St. Nick, nabbed his first iPad (a mini). He’ll be 10 in February and, after some fretting over the gravitational tug of electronics in his life, we decided to negotiate the pros and cons before the sleek device was placed under the tree.

In any case, he’s now able to use iCloud to send me texts to my iPhone. It’s at once warming and personal — my own son, whom I held in the delivery room and heard his first soul-jarring cry — can now communicate with me through an entirely new medium.

His texts, I note with some degree of fascination and wonder, are loaded with exclamation points (“I’m going to Dilan’s house today!!!!”) Because this is a new exchange with my son, and a tiny bitcoin-algorithm-like glimpse into his soul and creative process, I receive his dispatches with pleasure and curiosity (for now, of course).

But it also got me thinking — where on earth did we start to get inundated with exclamation marks as part of our global lexicon? Somewhere, somehow, my son picked up on this as an understood societal trait to properly convey his feelings in electronic form.

Edgar Allen Poe, back in the day, called these slim icons “admiration marks.” Of course, that was more than 160 years ago. Exclamation marks seem to rise and fall on their own, almost radically inserting themselves but never really commanding a whole lot of respect. (They’re just there!)

They’re so often over-used and misused that it’s hard to even take them seriously. They’re not often a threat, but they’re often an annoyance.

Personally, I’ve never liked them unless there were an absolute reason to plug one in. They should be used sparingly, interjecting or barking an occasional command, but not over-extending their welcome.

In my early career in journalism, most of us avoided them as if they were a skull-and-crossbones icon on our keyboard. They suggested a personal feeling, a potential breach in your journalistic credibility.

Now, in corporate America — and, of course, more broadly, the influential sphere of social media — these marks are slashed across the digital space with abandon. Emails, especially, bear the brunt of the load as workers feel compelled to use exclamation marks as simple badges to illustrate excitement (not necessarily genuine excitement) or as a means to diminish the bite of a message (“But don’t take it personally!”).

Whenever I am editing content, I find myself immediately drawn to exclamation marks, taking into account their collective number in a single communication and challenging each use along the way. (In nearly all cases, a period is suffice.) The more they’re used, I fear, the less trust is being established between writer and consumer.

In other words, as the digital space and its myriad interfaces continue to accessorize symbols and marks over the carefully-written word, we can’t pretend to cleanly separate scofflaws from style-abiding content producers. We can, however, choose our fighting space, one skinny mark at a time:

My son, just now: “Actually, I am going there!!!!”

Me: Great.