What's the deal with exclamation marks!!!

The BBQ Pit
41

I used to work for a magazine that dealt with auto/housing/farm equipment ads and we would have to type whatever the person writes on the form onto the ad.

What drove me insane was the amount of grown men and women who used exclamation marks at the end of each sentence or even worse, each word. Drove me mad trying to read through it and type it decently in the ad.

42

Wolfian Not only is Pokemon guilty of this, software messages in general use them too. I can’t count the times I’ve seen:

Installation Succesful! or Order Received!

Geez, are you surprised it worked?

43

IIRC, in all the comics I used to read as a kid around 1960 (Superman, Batman, etc.), all the sentences of dialogue ended with exclamation points. Maybe they were just easier to see than periods. Do comics still do this?

44

Preach it, brother.

It’s much worse when it’s attached to an error alert:

“File Not Found!”

or my favorite PPT alert:

“PowerPoint found an error it cannot correct!” Woo Hoo!!!

(FTR, we reomved exclamation points from Alert text a few versions ago b/c it was a pet peeve of so many of us).

45

Yeah, Dooku. I’m expecting someday to see: “Have a Nice Day!!!”

As somewhat of a hijack, software messages in general, suck. The two that bug me the most are:

  1. The “Powerpoint found and error it can’t correct!” variety, which tells you nothing and is totally useless. It might as well read “fnord!”.
  2. The kind that tell you exactly what’s wrong (and there is no other option). F’rinstance. “Line 2, position 1 must contain a left-parenthesis”. Well, if that’s what’s wrong, why don’t you just add it in there? You’re smart enough to know what’s wrong, so you should be smart enough to add it in. If it were “… must contain a left parenthesis or an exclamation mark”, OK. There’s some ambiguity there. [sub]Geez, I’m cranky today!!!@#%@#%^&&^()&&^!?!?!?[/sub]
46

Dear Sir or Madam,

Your recent e-mail message (quoted above) appears to have picked up an extraneous apostrophe. Please make another attempt at punctuation. We look forward to your business.

:smiley: