Delete Exclamation Points
If you need an exclamation mark to convey excitement, your writing isn’t exciting enough.
Overview
Your inner speech has vocal traits.
For example, you read slower or faster based on the author of the passage (and how fast they speak; Alexander & Nygaard, 2008).
Punctuation matters, too. Inner speech is more emphatic for exclamation points, which can sound weird in mundane contexts:
- I sat down!
It seems obvious, yet marketers insert these marks into mundane contexts – Buy Now! – to trigger excitement. Despite good intentions, this syntax can backfire because readers need to exclaim these trivial statements, which – inevitably – feels weird. Visitors then misattribute this negative emotion to the decision: Hmm, something doesn’t feel right. It must be the product.
I would avoid exclamation marks altogether. Your writing should be strong enough to trigger the desired emotion without punctuation.
- Alexander, J. D., & Nygaard, L. C. (2008). Reading voices and hearing text: Talker-specific auditory imagery in reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 34(2), 446.