Don’t Overthink Your Use of Exclamation Points!

Business leaders and employees make dozens of communication choices each day, from what to say to how to say it. In a recent research paper, we (three academics) focus on one such small decision—whether to use exclamation points—as a window into how people navigate the mundane choices that characterize so much of day-to-day communication.

Our interest in this stems from personal experience: as one of us with an affinity for exclamations observed, this style can come with some amount of creeping doubt. She has often found herself asking questions such as: Does this make me seem non-serious to my colleagues? Does my exclamatory style make students doubt my scientific chops? My competence? Or does it make me seem warm and engaging, as I hope? If I switch to a period or comma, will people see me as cold and remote? And why do I have the sneaking suspicion that my male colleagues aren’t asking themselves these questions at all?

Research in the social sciences has emphasized that small communication choices, such as the vocal pitch someone adopts, the specific words they use, and even the way they format their text messages, can shape the impressions people form of both a communicator and their message. Amid such heavy implications for small decisions, do exclamations offer yet another pitfall for leaders and employees as they strive to be taken seriously, collaborate with colleagues, and climb the corporate ladder? And does the awareness of potential consequences create its own burden, leading some people—perhaps especially women—to overly worry about how their communication style will be received?

To answer these questions, we conducted a series of studies examining how exclamations are actually received and the ways men and women navigate the decision to use them. Our findings can help people of all genders be more confident communicators with a better handle on what really happens when you use these seemingly inconsequential marks.

The Research

We began by considering normative expectations around exclamation point usage, finding that people readily rely on them as a cue for gender. In one study, we found that when a work-related email was written with exclamations, 61% of participants expected the writer to be female; when the same email was written with commas and periods (rather than exclamations), only 21% did so.

We further found that these normative expectations play an important role in driving men and women’s exclamation point usage. Women were more likely than men to perceive a norm for people like themselves to use exclamations, and men were more likely than women to perceive a norm for people like themselves to not use exclamations. These assessments of the prevailing norms helped explain women’s greater tendency to use exclamations. We also found that women reported being more conscious than men of their use of exclamation points, were more likely to feel that they used too many (as opposed to men who on average thought they used the right amount), and worried more than men about how others would perceive them based upon their exclamation point use.

Are women right to be especially concerned about their use of exclamation points compared to men, and do these small punctuation choices actually influence impressions?

To find out, we varied both exclamation point usage and the communicator’s gender and asked respondents to provide us with their impressions of the communicator. We found that evaluators felt more positively overall toward a communicator when the communication included exclamations (rating their overall impression as more positive and indicating a greater desire to work with the person), but that the effect of exclamations did not depend on the communicator’s gender. People also thought the communicator was warmer and more enthusiastic when the message had exclamations, but lower in analytical thinking and power; these patterns again emerged for both male and female communicators, suggesting that there was no unique “backlash” for women who did not use exclamations or men who did. There were no effects on perceived competence.

Why it Matters

These findings have important implications for both employees and leaders. They highlight the sort of everyday burden that women may particularly shoulder as they try to navigate expectations of their behavior at work—even in regards to something as tiny as an exclamation mark! Moreover, male leaders—who are less likely to experience this dynamic themselves—may fail to appreciate the complex calculations some of their female employees undertake when doing something as ordinary as writing an email. For employees—especially women—our findings should help alleviate concerns about overuse of exclamations. While use of exclamations did diminish perceptions of power and analytical thinking, they did not negatively impact perceptions of competence, and had a positive impact on perceptions of enthusiasm, warmth, and on evaluators’ overall impressions. And these effects were similar for men and women, suggesting that neither group should be overly concerned about matching exclamation usage to gendered expectations.

An important caveat to note, however, is that we conducted these studies in the U.S. and focused on people’s broad assessments of exclamation point usage; it is likely that individuals’ decisions to use exclamations and the impression the use of exclamations form are further influenced by a range of contextual factors that we did not examine. For example, organizational norms around formality, status dynamics within hierarchical relationships, and cultural variation in expressiveness and gender role differentiation might each shape women and men’s tendencies to use exclamations and how such usage is perceived.

As for ourselves, our findings have led us to embrace the exclamation point more fully (even the male author!), recognizing that its impact is likely to be more positive than negative. So that “Hi XYZ,” is now more likely a “Hi XYZ!”…  and if a tiny voice in our heads still worries that we sound somewhat like a Valley cheerleader, the rational part of our brains reminds us not to overthink it!