Exclamation marks!!!!

While many species are threatened with extinction, others thrive. Our garden is a heaving mass of tiny toads this summer and you tread the path with caution and dare not mow the lawn. Our cats have eaten enough to decide they don't want any more, although they are still partial to frogs when they find them. 

As in nature, so in punctuation. While the colon and semi-colon are rarely sighted these days, the exclamation mark is everywhere, hopping about in great clusters.

Treat exclamation marks as if they were chillies: a little goes a long way. Treat them as if you were carving them in stone rather than keeping one finger down on the keyboard. One exclamation mark means just that: it marks an exclamation. What do two or more mark? - they show only that, when you've used one previously, it was probably unnecessary. It's like an actor who shouts his first lines and then has to get even louder to signify anger or distress. Try taking all exclamation marks out of your work (and emails) and then put them back in only where one is required, i.e. after an exclamation. 'Watch out!' is an exclamation; 'she got off the train wearing pink slippers' is not.

Exclamation marks are the enemies of subtlety. Try and restict yourself to using them in dialogue only. 'She got off the train wearing pink slippers!' is justified if you want to indicate something about the character of the speaker, e.g. that she enjoys pointing out the shortcomings of others. After all, we don't use two or more question marks to indicate interrogation, or two or more full stops to indicate absolute finality (ellipses aside, which indicate the opposite). So no more multiple exclamation marks. As for !?! - that's the stuff of comics. Pow!