When Jon LaMantia, a Long Island-based business reporter, was in journalism school, his professor drilled one rule into his students: you get two exclamation points a year and no more.
“So if you use them in January,” LaMantia recalls being told, “you better hope there’s nothing to exclaim for the rest of the year.”
The rule stuck. LaMantia still thinks about that rigid quota today. “I use exclamation points all the time in texts and emails. If you don’t, the message sounds more stern,” he says. “But I can’t remember the last time I used one in a business article.”
Strong feelings about the exclamation point aren’t uncommon. People tend to either love it or loathe it; lean on it constantly, or avoid it religiously.
“Personally, I use multiple, but at work I’ll only use one,” says a woman who works in HR at an investment bank in New York City, who wasn’t cleared to speak publicly but said she couldn’t resist chiming in on this topic. “People say I’m bubbly and high-energy, so I use them to let my style come through in email—when appropriate.”
A consultant in Ohio, who also asked not to be named, tells me he uses them “to lighten the tone of written communication or reduce formality.” Others tread more cautiously. “I use way too many and then feel embarrassed later on,” admits an artist from Brooklyn. A Boston-based consultant says he’s begun actively “metering” his usage to “set the right tone.”
In short, exclamation points matter. They spark surprisingly strong feelings about tone, intention, and even etiquette. But according to new research, they also shape much more than just mood.
Warmer, But Less Analytical
A recent study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, titled “Nice to meet you. (!) Gendered norms in punctuation usage,” found that women not only use exclamation points more frequently than men, but that this difference carries real consequences—both for those writing and for those reading.
Across several experiments, participants judged writers who used exclamation points differently across measures that included perceived warmth, power, analytical ability, and competence. Heavy users—a group that overwhelmingly skews female—were seen as warmer and more enthusiastic, but also as less analytical.
The study also showed that women were more likely to think about their punctuation choices, whether to end a sentence with a period or an exclamation point, for example, underscoring the invisible cognitive labor that often shapes women’s communication.
All of it illustrates how something as small as punctuation can reinforce the subtle forces still underpinning stubborn gender norms and divides both at work, and beyond.
Unequal Cognitive Load
Cheryl Wakslak, associate professor of Management and Organization at Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California and one of the authors of the study, says she was particularly struck by how much mental energy women devote to these decisions.
“Women are putting a lot of thought into this,” she says. On one hand, intentional communication is valuable, she adds, “but it’s also a lot of cognitive energy that men are simply not spending.”
Women, she explains, are constantly navigating what she describes as a “warmth–competence tightrope.”
“They’re worried about not seeming warm, so they use exclamation points to appear warmer. But they’re also worried about not being seen as competent or powerful, and they may worry that exclamation marks undermine that.” Men, the research shows, largely don’t think about any of that.
Another finding that surprised her: the trade-offs of using exclamation points. Heavy users were perceived as more appealing collaborators and more enthusiastic, but also less powerful and less analytical.
“For me, the most interesting finding, though, was about competence,” says Wakslak. “We didn’t see a clear effect in either direction. That matters to me because, when I’m walking that tightrope, I’m mostly worried about the competence trade-off,” she adds. “I don’t need to seem powerful in every context, but I do want to seem competent.”
Still, she acknowledges that in some work environments, being perceived as analytical is crucial. “In those situations, based on these findings, a woman might want to avoid using exclamation marks.”
‘Perpetuating Stereotypes’
Asked about the exclamation point research, Elaine Lin Hering, author of Unlearning Silence, a book about verbal and nonverbal communication, says she’s not surprised.
“[The findings] illustrate the downside of the conditioning women have long received and the contorting women do to try to meet expectations. It is simply one of many examples of the double standards women are held to and the tension that women navigate every day,” she adds.
It’s akin, Hering says, to women being told to “smile more” in order to “appear warmer” and more “approachable”—and then finding themselves being taken less seriously because they smile too much.
And the issue extends beyond punctuation. “Workplace communication norms are typically defined by the groups with the dominant identity. Not just that everyone should ‘talk like a man,’ but that how people communicate should fit into the stereotypes that the dominant groups have of that other identity,” she says.
“Social norms exacerbate inequality by perpetuating existing stereotypes that the dominant group holds,” she explains, “like that ‘women are too emotional’ or ‘Asians are good workers but not leaders’ or that ‘Gen Z is lazy’.”
So what can be done? As ever, when the problem is rooted in social conditioning, there’s no easy fix. But Hering says that, especially in workplace settings, systems can be put in place to help control for biases like the ones that creep in when we read something someone’s written.
“We can challenge the social norms and exacerbated inequalities by having clear and consistent criteria for evaluating performance,” she says.
Research published in 2022, shows that women—because of systemic bias—are often assessed in workplaces based on their actual performance, while men are assessed based on their future potential creating what the academics dub a “gender promotion gap.” Having more rigid criteria for assessment can offset that divergence.
A wide awareness of the existence of these biases and this conditioning is also—of course—critical to making workplaces fairer. And Cheryl Wakslak’s coauthor Gil Appel is the first to admit that. Appel, Assistant Professor of Marketing at the GW School of Business at George Washington University, says that spending time researching gender and communication has made him “much more of a feminist.”
“There are some things that men just don’t have to think about at all, and women have to think about all the time,” he says. “Whether that’s to ensure their safety, or whether it’s to make sure they’re coming across as competent,” he adds. “They just always have to be thinking.”
And beyond becoming more feminist, there’s one other thing that’s changed for Appel since working on the research: “I have to admit,” he says, “I definitely use more exclamation marks now.”