I used to think there were two sorts of people in the world: those who used exclamation marks in their work emails and those who did not. <\/p>\n
I also thought that frequent users of what Americans insist on calling exclamation \u201cpoints\u201d were less serious, less worldly and less professional. <\/p>\n
As a result, I shunned the things, especially if writing to someone important or anyone with the power to shape my future, as in a boss. I never felt as strongly as Terry Pratchett<\/a>, whose novels have characters saying the use of multiple exclamation marks is a sure sign of an \u201cinsane\u201d or \u201cdiseased\u201d mind. But I appreciated the sentiment. <\/p>\n Somewhere along the line, though, possibly around the time I sent my first emoji, I caved. \u201cHello!\u201d I started writing to colleagues. \u201cThat\u2019s fantastic news!\u201d \u201cThanks!\u201d <\/p>\n I blame this on the informality that social media ushered in and the pandemic, which seemed to intensify said informality. But I now wonder if I did it for another, more dubious reason. Was it because I sensed that a growing number of men at work \u2013 colleagues, contacts, bosses \u2013 had started to do the same thing? <\/p>\n This thought occurred last week when I came across some research from the US confirming what I had always dimly suspected about exclamation marks. <\/p>\n First, women use them a lot more than men \u2013 nearly three times as much, by some counts. Second, women do this because they worry they will seem too cold and unfriendly if they don\u2019t. <\/p>\n Third, they then spend even more time worrying about whether this makes them seem incompetent or inferior. This is because women are, in the words of the research paper, \u201cmore sensitive to potential downstream impression formation implications of using exclamation points\u201d. <\/p>\n