Jacob Rubin is against the overuse of exclamation marks, and cites several heavy literary hitters to make his case:

Elmore Leonard advises, “You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.” Declaim the original Strunk and White, in their legendary sotto voce: “Do not attempt to emphasize simple statements by using a mark of exclamation.” Their example? ” ‘It was a wonderful show!’ should be, ‘It was a wonderful show.’”

Stuart Jeffries cites another great writer on exclamation marks:

“Cut out all those exclamation marks,” wrote F Scott Fitzgerald. “An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own jokes.”

John Gruber replies:

Count me in with Fitzgerald:

Well, count me in with Stan Lee!!! I mean, where would the golden and silver ages of comics be without the exclaimation point?

In shorter formats where context is in short supply, punctuation is needed to help stress the tone of a sentence. E-mail, instant messaging, twittering, and even blog posts all benefit from the benefits of clarity of tone.

True, exclamation point (a.k.a. bang), can be abused. Punctuate too many sentences that way, and you end up diluting the impact of the bang. And it gets annoying.

But in shorter forms of writing where context is in short supply, such as text messages, e-mail, twitter, and sometimes even blog posts, punctuation is critical to setting the tone of a sentence.

Emoticons often serve the same purpose, but often suffer from an utter lack of subtlety. The use of the smiley face to show that the prior statement was supposed to be a joke is often done to excess. In this context, F. Scott’s comment about “laughing at your own jokes” becomes a much more literal critique.

Sadly I’m guilty abusing the smiley emoticon in instant messaging, myself.

In comics however, letterers have many more tricks up their sleeves than just punctuation. Typographic effects like bolding, italicizing, changing the size of text shows both emphasis, and a weakness of tone. Font selection can also help set the tone. A shaky font could be used to show fear in a character’s dialog.

Such effects are long time tradition in comics of all genres, and aid the reader greatly when done well. However outside of comics, such tricks are unacceptable, unorthodox, unwelcomed, and downright OBNOXIOUS !!!

Where’s the BLINK tag when you need it?

via Daring Fireball & Jason Kottke