This time it’s all about the excla­ma­tion points. I once sug­gested to a staff mem­ber that per­haps she should use fewer excla­ma­tion points in her emails to clients. I’m of the opin­ion that most peo­ple think the excla­ma­tion mark con­veys some­thing that it doesn’t actu­ally con­vey. Men With Pens elab­o­rates well on this theme. In reg­u­lar cor­re­spon­dence, this punc­tu­a­tion doesn’t make you sound chip­per. It just looks forced. Con­sider what this arti­cle is say­ing about excla­ma­tion marks in web­site copy — it applies equally in any kind of mar­ket­ing copy. More often than not, I sus­pect they tend to make the mes­sage lose cred­i­bil­ity rather than suc­cess­fully prompt­ing the reader to action.