Everything is better with an exclamation mark!

A few years ago I stopped using emoticons in text messages (yes, emoticons - my Jurassic phone has no emojis) and soon enough some people seemed to think I was angry with them. You know, because I showed no emotion in my texts. And no emotion was taken as anger. What the hell?

So I got nifty and started using exclamation marks instead. It was a huge success. (The things I consider to be huge successes are quite weird, I admit.) The one character conveyed all the emotion I wanted to express and saved precious limited character space for one text - if the character limit was exceeded the phone would automatically and without warning break the message into two parts and I would pay twice the money. (I wonder if I'm the only one with this problem anymore.) The two characters needed to say "I'm super cool and smiling" or "I'm happy" or "My mouth is an S" (whatever that means - "I'm sick"?) was replaced with one. I know that sounds like a marginal gain but you only need to use the exclamation mark once in the entire text to get the point through. And what's more, if I wanted to convey anger, I would replace the exclamation mark with a full stop or leave it out completely.

The exclamation mark has the ability to strengthen anything you want to say so use it wisely use it whenever you can. Good things become better with it. Bad things as well, though perhaps to their respective direction. But that's not a bad thing - amazing good things and devastating bad things are better than grey mediocrity.

Today was such a great day. This coffee tastes exquisite. I'm so happy to be alive.
Today was such a great day! This coffee tastes exquisite! I'm so happy to be alive!

Which sounds like a sarcastic person who's lost hope in life? And which sounds genuinely happy?

RK