I Promise I’m Not Mean, I Just Gave Up Exclamation Points for Lent

And found some very creative (very profane) workarounds.
exclamation points
Cristina Cianci

In my many, many years as a Catholic, I have given up many, many things for Lent. As a kid, it was usually Milky Ways. In college, it was usually beer. And as an adult, it was shopping or swearing, two things I hate to admit I do much too often. But this year, I decided to abstain from exclamation points. I gave them up in emails, texts, and on all social media, effective on March 1, Ash Wednesday.

This punctuation cleanse was my way of making a sacrifice. I’d been raised to give up some kind of sin in the weeks leading up to Easter, in order to root out the evil in my life and bring me closer to God. Not that God ever declared exclamation points (or candy bars or beer) as sinful, but the idea has always been to give up something that is hard to give up.

When I decided to do this, I thought long and hard about how I’d end my sentences. The journalist in me knows that any punctuation is better than no punctuation. I couldn’t just let a sentence—even a very short one—end with nothing, because that would just look like I had forgotten how to punctuate. So I made the decision to use periods instead of going 100 percent punctuation-free.

My first few days were easy, and I found other ways to be enthusiastic.

About three hours into my first exclamation-free day, I didn’t feel like I was making a sacrifice. I actually felt kind of liberated. I was not forcing enthusiasm where it was not deserved. For instance, I was asked to be part of a committee for the local high school’s fundraiser, and I politely declined. Normally, I’d end my email with a “I so wish I could be part of it!!!” Instead, I just wrote, “I so wish I could be part of it.” Both are true statements, but the latter is a more apt summation of my actual emotion over it.

This might be easier than I assumed, I thought. Then about three days after I’d started, my oldest daughter texted me with some thrilling news about a medical school she’d applied to. Without exclamations, how could I possibly let her know exactly how excited I was?

Enter, the f-word.

Because she’d doubted herself but I never had, I just wrote her back saying, “I fucking knew it.” It felt like a well-placed expletive was a solid replacement for the ordinary marker of excitability.

I used the f-bomb often. Maybe too often. (Like a habit I might have to break during the Lenten season of 2018.) When a friend told me she was getting back together with her on-again-off-again boyfriend, I wanted to let her know that I was stunned and that I hoped she was for real. I typed out this email reply: “Are you serious?” But as I read that three-word email aloud, I realized that without the double punctuation of ?!, I didn’t know if she’d know where I stood. I might’ve sounded like, “I hope you’re not serious.” Or, just as likely, “I’m so thrilled and I hope you are serious.”

So I back-spaced over those three words, and then to make sure she knew my feelings were good ones, I went with, “Are you fucking serious? That’s so God damn amazing.” (Yes, I acknowledge the irony of saying “God damn” as a way to keep my Lenten commitment.)

Women and men responded differently to my dead-serious-sounding communications.

Later in that first week, my son was celebrating his 20th birthday. But he’s away at school and only communicates exclusively via text, and I knew he would be expecting some enthusiasm, especially from his own mother. But how celebratory does “Happy Birthday.” sound? Not very.

He didn’t remark on the brusque period. Maybe because he’s a guy. And maybe because he usually opts for zero punctuation. As the son of a writer, he should know better, but now I’m starting to see the value in it. My “Happy Birthday” might have sounded more fun without the period, because without any punctuation, it would just sound like I was too busy to bother ending sentences properly.

The first person to actually speak up about the disappearance was my youngest daughter. In an otherwise benign exchange about her ongoing senioritis, a common side effect of being 18, she asked me, “What’s with all the periods?” And later in the conversation she asked. “Am I in trouble?” I texted back that I’d given up exclamation points for Lent, and she replied with a string of prayer-hands and heart-eyes emojis.

I remember thinking that if one son and one daughter responded so differently, maybe that was generally the case for each gender. And that if I sounded more like a man in my communications, which I definitely thought I did, was that okay? By omitting the dot and dash—and smiley faces, hearts, and XOs that often go hand-in-hand with girlish enthusiasm—I felt like my correspondence had taken a decidedly masculine turn.

Some research has shown that women tend to use emotive punctuation more than men, but those studies aren’t all up to date (the majority of them were published more than a decade ago), and they don’t take into account that both genders now do the majority of their texting and emailing from their smart phones. Anecdotally, though, that’s what I’ve seen in all my years of communicating with men and women. I have been a journalist for a few decades, and some days it feels like I write more emails and texts than stories—and I get just as many emails and texts in return. So I see day in and day out how differently the genders use punctuation.

It’s as if this one little sentence-ender—the exclamation point—somehow parallels the effusiveness of the female gender. (Not everyone of course, but speaking generally.) We talk with exclamations in our voice, so it would stand to reason that we’d talk with them in our written word.

I ran my observation by an expert, who helped me understand why women would use exclamation points more often than men.

Jean Berko Gleason, Ph.D., a psycholinguist and professor emerita at Boston University’s department of psychological and brain sciences, explains to me that it makes sense that women would use the marks more often. “There are different language characteristics associated with men's and women's gender roles in our society,” she tells me. “Men are expected to be less emotional than women. So men may be expressing themselves in accordance with the expectation that they remain cool people who don't get carried away.”

The trouble with that, she explains, is that when people use exclamation points too often, they can be seen as a little insincere. “There are plenty of places when an exclamation point is a good thing,” she said, citing a brief text of ‘Thanks!’ In that example, that one mark can soften a short correspondence that might otherwise seem too brusque.”

Mid-experiment, I started feeling like an emotionless bitch.

Somewhere during the middle of Lent, I sensed that a kind of double standard was washing over me: now that I was a non-user, I wondered about the sincerity of exclamation point users. Even though I have spent the majority of my life corresponding with an abundance of exclamations, once I stopped doing it I found that I was overly mindful of other people’s punctuation. No judgement, but rather just an unintentional tally. “She used six exclamations in that text about having coffee. Is she that caffeine starved? Or am I just wonderful company?” I wondered.

I also just started to feel really unfriendly. Even more than that, downright harsh. No one came out and called me a stone-cold beotch, but it was how I felt. I also sensed that my words weren’t always conveying my real, true happiness—which meant I needed to work harder to let my words do the talking and the emoting. So when I was saying something in an ordinary exclamation-free way, I have to choose words that would go a long way.

Carefully chosen words became my new enthusiasm.

Since I was doing this in digital communications, mostly texts and emails, I couldn’t convey emotional cues with non-verbal tactics like facial expressions and body language. So I started to rely on a lot of modifiers. “Hope I get to see you” became “Really hope I get to see your gorgeous face very soon.” And “Thanks” became “Thanks so much for the kind words and all the helpful support you’ve given me.” Also, I used some highly exaggerated claims of just how moved I was by things. When a celebrity commented on an Instagram post of mine and a friend noticed, all I could say in reply was “I’m dying.”

Then there were the hashtags. Before this experiment, I didn’t always lean on the little side remarks of social media. But now a simple #blessed was my go-to add-on. Not just on social media posts, but in texts and emails, too. Like when my husband told me he hooked the Roku up to our big TV, #blessed. When my coworker moved on to a better job, #blessed. When my sister told me she was making a spontaneous road trip to Chicago, #blessed. To readers, that might have seemed kind of heavy-handed—who takes the time to end an email with a pound sign and words?—but to me they were a solution to a problem.

Another tool I used in lieu of the exclamation was the good ol’ triple question mark. The plain “You’re here?” became so much more enthused with two added question marks. “You’re here???” sounds like I’m over the moon, doesn’t it???

And while I am not normally an all-caps girl, I found myself clinging to the caps lock key a little more often when I needed to tell someone that I was LEGIT CRYING RIGHT NOW (during that last episode of This Is Us), or that I was COUNTING THE DAYS UNTIL NYC (when I would be reunited with my high school girlfriends).

Without the forced enthusiasm, things were more straightforward.

By about the fourth week, I was starting to appreciate a good, exclamation-free incoming message. Whether it was from a man or a woman, I liked the straight-forwardness of it all. There was no reading between the lines of a text, trying to navigate the uncertain waters littered with too much punctuation and too many emojis and what they even mean.

By the very end of my abstinence, I learned some things about myself. One, I’m just not chill. What I am, deep down, is an enthusiast. Not being able to use the exclamation was like not being able to be myself. And two, 40 days is a long time to go without something you use on a regular basis.

The late author Elmore Leonard long advised that writers keep their exclamation points under control, even urging them to limit themselves to no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. Granted, he wrote that 16 years ago—before the whole world became so digitally connected, words became an afterthought, and punctuation turned into some kind of modern-day hieroglyphics—but I think his advice is still sound. And something we should all keep in mind once we are over the age of, say 12.

I’ve learned to be more intentional with the exclamation points I use. (And I’m really excited to be able to use them again!)

Now that Lent is over and I’m free to use exclamation points as freely as I used to, I don’t know that I will. I think I will be more judicious about where they belong, and more importantly, where they don’t. The lessons I’ve learned, about choosing words more carefully and filling in the virtual blanks with a more thoughtful show of enthusiasm, will help me think through the auto-pilot punctuation spree I was on 40 days ago.

Certainly, there will still be times when exclamation points are warranted. It’s not like when someone goes without carbs for a while and then tells you, “I don’t miss them. I’ll never go back.” It’s just that now when I put one or two exclamation points in a message, it will mean more because of how scarce they’ve become. Then again, sometimes they just feel right.

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