Anybody who has ever logged on knows that online writing begets exclamation points. A lot of exclamation points! Mocking this punctuational predilection is easy and fun. An amusing blog called “Excessive Exclamation!!” features photos …
David Shipley […] and Will Schwalbe, authors of “Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better,” speculate that the trend stems in part from the nature of online media. “Because email is without affect, it has a dulling quality that almost necessitates kicking everything up a notch just to bring it to where it would normally be,” they write.
Internet writing also encourages extravagant combining of exclamation points and question marks. This punctuation yoking, traditionally confined to comic-book ejaculations such as “What the ?!…,” had a brief moment in the sun in the 1960s, when, according to a Web site devoted to this tale, an ad man named Martin K. Speckter promoted the idea of combining the two marks into one, called the “Interrobang.”
I’ve always had a soft spot for the interrobang. It’s disappointing that it never caught on.