All about the "!"

I'm not a big user of exclamation points. They feel like the literary equivalent of someone grabbing your arm mid-sentence to shout this matters, pay attention, I’m excited, you should be too! It’s a bit desperate.

Maybe I’ve just been online too long. Everything’s urgent there and the exclamation point has been drafted into service like a cheap confetti cannon: loud, disposable, and mostly covering up the fact that not much actually happened.

As a writer, I’d rather earn the feeling. If something’s funny, let it land. If it’s sharp, let it cut. Slapping an exclamation point at the end seems like an unnecessary short cut. Good writing, trusts the reader to meet it halfway, without all the waving and shouting.

I’m not saying ban them. I use one now and then, like hot sauce. But if every sentence needs a kick, maybe the problem isn’t punctuation. Maybe the writing’s just bland. 

So, I think word processors need a function that only allows one exclamation point to be used every 50,000 keystrokes and I encourage someone more technical that me to build an app that, when you read an exclamation point online, an "applause" sign will appear and flash.

And like author F. Scott Fitzgerald, many writers are very opinionated about this punctuation mark:

I bet when all the punctuation marks have a party, they quietly look at exclamation point's wife and think, that poor woman. – Dana Gould

Never trust an exclamation point. – Linda Urban

Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind. – Terry Pratchett

In the family of punctuation, where the full stop is daddy and the comma is mummy, and the semicolon quietly practises the piano with crossed hands, the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit brother who gets overexcited and breaks things and laughs too loudly. – Lynne Truss

People complain about my exclamation points, but I honestly think that's the way people think. I don't think people think in essays; it's one exclamation point to another. – Tom Wolfe

In almost all situations that do not involve immediate physical danger or great surprise, you should think twice before using an exclamation mark. If you have thought twice and the exclamation mark is still there, think about it three times, or however many times it takes until you delete it. –Howard Mittelmark,

So far as good writing goes, the use of the exclamation mark is a sign of failure. It is the literary equivalent of a man holding up a card reading LAUGHTER to a studio audience. – Miles Kington

 Most of us were trained to distrust the exclamation point—at worst, to hate its cheery, unhinged energy. - Ann Handley 

An excessive use of exclamation marks is a certain indication of an unpractised writer or of one who wants to add a spurious dash of sensation to something unsensational. – Henry Watson Fowler

Never use three exclamation points when one will do. – Christine Edwards

And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head. – Terry Pratchett

Only one thing more mortifying than having an exclamation mark removed by an editor: an exclamation mark added in. – Lynne Truss

Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. – Elmore Leonard

The exclamation point is a loud party-goer, demanding attention. Overdone, it can be annoying. – James Scott Bell 

Even the lauded TV show Seinfeld weighed in on the exclamation point:

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DEFINITION: The exclamation mark, !, also sometimes referred to as the exclamation point, is a punctuation mark usually used after an interjection or exclamation to indicate strong feelings or to show emphasis. The exclamation mark often marks the end of a sentence, for example: "Watch out!". Similarly, a bare exclamation mark (with nothing before or after) is often established in warning signs.

The exclamation mark is often used in writing to make a character seem as though they are shouting and/or excited/surprised. It can also be used in fiction writing for a person who is doing the same thing but in real life. 

Overuse results in the loss of the excitement or urgency it represents.

I woke up in Tokyo wearing someone else’s pants

After 15 hours on a plane, I took a one hour bus ride followed by a short walk to my Tokyo hotel. The plan: shower, sleep, and leave early to catch the bullet train to Osaka.

 
Let me make a confession: I’m a marketing copywriter, not a travel writer. Which is why I couldn’t pass on the headline “I woke up in Tokyo wearing someone else’s pants”. You see, my hotel, like many others in Japan, supply pajamas for their guests. So the pants I wore to bed were the hotel’s, not mine. Boring, but the set up for a titillating click bait headline.
 
Which brings me to an important lesson for writers. Especially marketing writers.
 
Make sure that your copy/content delivers on your headline's promise. Otherwise, not only will you lose your audience, but chances are you’ll anger them and never be able to earn their attention, much less their business, again.

Content Creation and Productivity in the Age of AI

 

People keep blaming AI for killing content creativity, but it was already headed toward the food court version of itself long before the robots showed up.

For years, the industry has rewarded speed over thought. More posts. More campaigns. More platforms. Less time to sit with an idea long enough to make it weird or honest or memorable.

Then AI walked into the room like an overqualified intern and said, “You want 400 pieces of acceptable content by This afternoon? No problem.”

The speed and volume were impressive, but the actual content? Technically competent and perfectly acceptable because a lot of modern content already sounded machine-made before machines started making it. AI just perfected the dialect: upbeat, frictionless, emotionally beige. Every sentence polished to the texture of dentist office waiting room furniture.

It’s ubiquitous now: every platform is drowning in words, and somehow almost none of them feel written by anybody.

Because good writing usually comes from tension. Hesitation. Somebody wrestling with a thought long enough to surprise themselves a little. Meaning takes time. Taste takes time. Original thought takes an uncomfortable amount of sitting around staring at nothing, which modern workflows treat like a fire-able offense.

Everything now is optimized to remove the pause. But the pause is usually where the interesting stuff lives. The culture has become deeply impatient with the actual process of creativity: the slow, inefficient part where someone has to think hard enough to say something real.

The Financialization of the Economy

 

I was in line for coffee at Peets. Six bucks for something that used to cost pocket change. 

The guy in front of me was working an investment app like he was playing a slot machine. And, on the surface, it almost seemed normal. Not just the price of the coffee, but the vibe: Everything’s an asset now. Your house, your retirement, your side hustle, your attention span.

Finance stopped being a support system for the economy and quietly became the main character. Instead of helping businesses make things, it increasingly makes money from money. And it’s very good at it.

Corporations used to talk about building products, expanding operations, hiring people. Now they talk about “maximizing shareholder value” like it’s a sacred chant. Which often translates into stock buybacks, cost-cutting, and a kind of corporate calorie restriction: trim the workforce, boost the share price, repeat. It’s like running a restaurant where you slowly replace the food with accounting tricks but still expect five-star reviews.

To be fair, the system rewards this behavior. Executives are paid in stock. Investors want quick returns. Markets react to quarterly earnings like toddlers on sugar. So companies optimize for that. You don’t need a conspiracy when incentives are this loud.

Meanwhile, regular people are pulled into the same orbit. Retirement used to mean pensions. Predictable, boring, almost comforting. Now it’s 401(k)s, index funds, and a vague sense that you should probably know what the S&P 500 did today. We’ve all been conscripted into being part-time financiers, whether we signed up or not. It’s like being told you’re now responsible for flying the plane mid-flight, but don’t worry, there’s a YouTube tutorial.

There’s also this strange side effect where everything starts to look like a trade. Housing isn’t just shelter; it’s an investment vehicle. Education isn’t just learning; it’s ROI. Even companies that clearly make physical things behave like hedge funds with a side gig in manufacturing. The real economy, the one with stuff you can touch, starts to feel like a supporting actor in its own story.

And then there’s inequality, which shows up like an uninvited guest who refuses to leave. When profits flow more toward financial channels than wages, the gains tend to concentrate. If you own assets, great. If you don’t, you’re mostly watching the scoreboard from the sidelines. It’s not exactly subtle.

It isn’t just the imbalance, it’s the way it reshapes how we think. There’s a quiet cultural shift where everything becomes a calculation. Is this worth my time? My energy? My “personal brand”? We start to sound like spreadsheets with opinions. Even creativity gets nudged into metrics -- views, clicks, monetization -- as if its main job is to justify its own existence in dollars.

I get the appeal. Finance is efficient. It’s scalable. It promises control in a world that feels increasingly chaotic. But it’s also a bit like using a chainsaw to butter toast. Impressive, sure, but maybe not the right tool for everything.

I don’t think the answer is to romanticize some pre-finance golden age, that ship sailed a while ago (probably leveraged and sold in tranches). But it does seem worth asking whether we’ve let the logic of finance seep too far into places it doesn’t belong. Not everything needs to be optimized, traded, or turned into a yield.

Sometimes a house should just be a house. A job should just be a job. And coffee, expensive or not, shouldn’t feel like a symptom of a system that’s constantly trying to turn your morning into a market opportunity.

Or maybe that’s just me, standing in line, watching someone refresh a stock app while the barista mispronounces my name.