Do We Really Need to Stop Using Exclamation Marks in Work Emails?

I like to think I’m a bit of a badass. (And I use the word bit very purposefully.) I’ve jumped out of a plane at 14,500 feet. I’ve lived abroad. I run my own business. But ask me to send a straightforward email to an editor without exclamation points and I start shaking in my proverbial boots. And I’m not the only woman who feels this way.

Recently, I had to reach out to an editor about a (very) late payment. I wrote what I thought was a stern email, then asked my husband to read it over, as I often do when I send correspondence that I think could have major consequences. He read it, and then kindly and swiftly ripped it apart.

“You don’t need to say ‘just,'” he pointed out. (After expressing how I hoped she was doing well—exclamation point!—I’d informed my editor I was “just” writing to ask about the overdue payment, and that I “just” hoped she’d look into it.) “Say what you mean,” he encouraged. “You don’t have to tiptoe around it. She owes you money, remember?”

The guy was right. But as I stripped my email of exclamation points and deleted each “just” that email contained, I couldn’t help but feel afraid that now that I’d stood up for myself, I would never get paid, let alone work for that publication again.

The world didn’t end. I did eventually get my money. The work did not dry up. But ask me if I still litter my emails with exclamation points and apologies and the answer is yes!

There’s been a bit of buzz recently about why women feel compelled to add so much more positive emotion to their email correspondence. Earlier this month, the New Statesman ran an article exploring that very topic, offering up a 2006 study that showed women use significantly more exclamation points in their emails than men in order to appear more friendly to colleagues and higher-ups.

(A recent casual experiment between a male and a female coworker may illuminate why women feel the need to be so darn friendly. When the duo swapped email signatures for a week, the man got a rude awakening. “I was in hell,” he tweeted afterward. “Everything I asked or suggested was questioned.” Meanwhile, his female coworker “had the most productive week of her career,” he wrote. “I realized the reason she took longer is [because] she had to convince clients to respect her.”)

Days before that New Statesman article—which also inspired this Mashable essay—ran, a Q&A with feminist writer Jessica Valenti was published on Poynter’s blog. When asked why she thinks women use exclamation points in their emails, here’s what Valenti had to say: “Anecdotally, I think it’s because women feel the need to come across as constantly friendly and accessible. And they’re right to feel that way, unfortunately—there have been numerous studies about the way women are viewed in the workplace, and being ‘unlikeable’ is a real issue. I think it’s a way for us to come across as nonthreatening or to relay friendliness in a format where tone can be unclear.” I can confirm that’s why I pepper them throughout my own emails.

“Trying to find the right tone in an email is a challenge many women face,” confirms millennial career expert Jill Jacinto. “They want to make their point without it sounding bossy or lax. It’s a tightrope walk for many women professionals. In fact, I have several clients who frequently share their email drafts with me or their friends to double-check the tone and make sure it comes across in the right way.”

I brought up my exclamation point problem with a friend, and she admitted she also has to stop herself from ending too many sentences with exclamation points—or smiley faces. “There’s so much pressure as a woman to not sound like a bitch,” she said. “I spend a lot of time softening my language, even when it’s not particularly harsh to begin with, so that I don’t come off as brusque.” My friend does this with good reason: After sending an email without any exclamation points, she was asked by the recipient—a male coworker—if it was her time of the month. “What an a—hole,” she said, recalling that moment. Yet, even though she knows his reaction was wrong—and there was nothing wrong with her email—my friend still edits herself. “I just don’t want to deal with that again,” she admitted.

Another friend, who works in the technology industry—an industry known to be overwhelmingly male—said she has slowly been teaching herself to write emails without worrying about how they’re received. But for her, that actually means adding exclamation points to her emails. When I asked her to explain, here’s what she wrote me:

“When I first started in tech, I spent the first six months of my new job suffering from imposter syndrome. I feared that my boss would wake up one day and realize that I wasn’t the right fit. I was the opposite of the engineers who had come to define the company’s culture, where emails were concise, emotionless, and at times condescending. In order to match their style, I would edit everything I sent, getting rid of pleasantries, exclamation marks, or ‘fluff’ words that would not only remind them I was a female, but a young female. I wanted my emails to command as much respect as [the ones from] my male coworkers and to do that, I believed I had to ‘write like a dude.'”

“But the truth is, this never sat well with me. So after six months of trying to fit the mold, I decided it was no longer worth masking my personality in correspondences. While I still keep things short, I don’t shy away from using GIFs and cheeky jokes to get my point across. I’m a great employee who happens to be a woman. I don’t need to sacrifice one of those identities for the other. It’s my tiny way of making it easy for the women who come after me. Fingers crossed, years from now, those young chicks won’t have to think twice about starting their emails with a big, fat, bold exclamation mark.”

It’s a great approach. And it leads to my last point: With all this hoopla about whether women should or shouldn’t write with exclamation points or filler words, we might be missing a larger issue of this debate. We should be able to craft emails the way we want—without worrying whether certain punctuation marks have a place. We should be able to communicate without anxiety, period.

One last friend has long had that idea down pat, so I asked for her advice. This friend very rarely uses exclamation points in her emails—she even leaves them out of text messages. Why? Because that’s how she speaks, she explained to me simply.

“I write just like I talk,” she texted me. “It feels unnatural for me to write, ‘I’m so excited!’ because I put a downward voice inflection at the end of my sentences.”

So I’m committing to writing emails how I want to write emails. For me, that will mean an exclamation point here and there, but only when I mean them—not when I’m too scared to leave them out. What would writing emails the way you talk—and how you really feel—look like for you?