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Outpoll | The High-Stakes Politics of Exclamation Points

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The High-Stakes Politics of Exclamation Points

OthereducationEdTech Innovations

The High-Stakes Politics of Exclamation Points

When Jon LaMantia, a business reporter from Long Island, recalls his journalism school days, he remembers a professor laying down a law that felt almost biblical in its rigidity: you get two exclamation points a year, and that’s it. Use them in January, the lesson went, and you’d better hope the rest of the year holds nothing worth exclaiming about.That rule, LaMantia admits, has stuck with him through his career; he’ll pepper texts and emails with them to avoid sounding stern, but in a professional article? He can’t remember the last time one made the cut. His story isn’t unique.In talking to people about this tiny piece of punctuation, you uncover a whole universe of personal policy and quiet anxiety. A woman in HR at a New York investment bank, who asked not to be named, told me she uses them to let her ‘bubbly’ style come through in emails, but only when appropriate.An Ohio consultant uses them as a tool to lighten tone and reduce formality, while a Brooklyn artist confessed to using ‘way too many’ and feeling a pang of embarrassment afterward. A Boston-based consultant has started actively ‘metering’ his usage to set the right tone.These aren’t just grammatical preferences; they’re tiny, daily performances of self, revealing how deeply we think about how we’re perceived. And according to new research, these performances aren’t neutral—they’re gendered, and they carry real weight.A study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, titled ‘Nice to meet you. (!) Gendered norms in punctuation usage,’ found that women use exclamation points more frequently than men, and this difference shapes how they are judged.Writers who used them were seen as warmer and more enthusiastic, but also as less analytical and powerful. Perhaps more tellingly, the study showed that women were more likely to expend cognitive energy deliberating over these choices, a subtle form of labor men largely don’t shoulder.Cheryl Wakslak, an associate professor at USC’s Marshall School of Business and a co-author of the study, describes this as walking a ‘warmth–competence tightrope. ’ Women, she explains, use exclamation points to seem warmer but simultaneously worry that doing so undermines their perceived competence and power.Men, the research indicates, generally don’t grapple with this tension at all. The trade-offs are tangible: heavy users were viewed as more appealing collaborators, yet less analytical.For Wakslak, the most intriguing finding was about competence—the study didn’t show a clear negative effect, which matters to her personally. ‘I don’t need to seem powerful in every context, but I do want to seem competent,’ she says.

#exclamation points

#workplace communication

#gender norms

#cognitive load

#punctuation

#social psychology

#editorial picks news

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Comments

PunctuationPirate85d ago

lol the two exclamation points a year rule is so real, my old editor would have a fit seeing my slack messages 😬 and yeah, the mental load of it all is exhausting, like we're all just out here trying to seem competent but also not a robot

GlobalGazer87d ago

it’s wild how this same warmth vs competence tightrope plays out in emails from tokyo to toronto we’re all performing these tiny adjustments just to be heard

HistoryBuff4287d ago

for anyone who missed it — this connects to their february announcement about gendered communication norms. the study they cite builds on earlier work about the 'warmth–competence tightrope' women navigate. a useful thread to bookmark for future reference on this topic.