Make your Mark

My editing professor warns us not to overuse exclamation points.

Yet I can’t seem to avoid them.

They’re everywhere — even in the Cronkite building, two days after my Intro to Editing professor warned us against their usage.

“They can make you look childish,” she told the rowdy, freshman-ridden Wednesday class.

With this reservation stewing in the back of my mind, I had exclamation marks on the brain.

The next Friday, when we had to walk around campus to search for pictures to walk about, I immediately noticed that the light peering through the window looked exactly like an exclamation mark.

“Oh my God!” I thought. “They’re everywhere!” As an excitable, enthusiastic young student, I often think in exclamation points. Thus, when I first saw this symbol etched in the ground of the Cronkite stairwell, I gasped on the inside, my every thought ending with an exclamation point.

So why does the exclamation mark make us look childish?

This reminds me of a classic Seinfeld scene, in which copy writer Elaine Bennis was made fun of by her boss for being too excited over exclamation marks. (I have noticed that women tend to use them more than men, which makes me wonder how gender influences our communication styles.)