A personal quirk that I must struggle to keep under control: my propensity to over-use exclamation marks! Sure, on occasion they're appropriate, especially to show excitement, surprise, emphasis, strong emotion, or simply a loud noise (bang!). But must I employ exclams on a majority of ZhurnalWiki pages, as a quick survey suggests I have done? (At the start of a line "!!", "!!!", etc. are a wiki syntactic cue to format an HTML header — but that doesn't explain most of the observed instances!)

I need to cut back!!!

(see also MyAffectations (19 Jan 2003), NetfreeProgramming (21 Oct 2003), ... )

TopicWriting - TopicHumor - 2004-03-22

A couple of unoriginal thoughts:

I think part of the percieved punctuation problem is
that blogs are often a casual thing, a bit like
someone talking to a friend while out taking a walk.
All the vocal clues we usually have available, pauses,
volume, pitch, tone, etc, are missing and have to be
emulated with symbols. The english profs have very
stylized and rigid rules for punctuation that probably
work well for them when writing five paragraph essays
and deconstructing some poor author, but it's just not
good enough for what a blogger is trying to do. Not
enough bandwidth.

So, keep it up!! And maybe you should consider
emoticons:-)

Ed

(correlates: ChatTuringTest, MercifulSchadenfreude, OxfordCommas, ...)