Women are more excitable and friendly, according to their exclamation marks!!!
Being a lingo luvvie I was loving an article in the Guardian this week by Stuart Jeffries re. the use and abuse of the exclamation mark (! - !) in this digital communications age (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/apr/29/exclamation-mark-punctuation - which, by the way, is a great example of SEO best practice for URLs).
Jeffries reported that women tend to be the worst offenders of exclamation mark excess, and cited evidence by Carol Waseleski, in her catchily titled paper “Gender and the Use of Exclamation Points in Computer-Mediated Communication” (! – oh no, it’s true!). Waseleski suggested that were a sign of both excitability and friendliness, and that one reason why women use exclamation marks more than men is that they tend to be less socially inept. Carol sounds like my kind of thinker!
And according to a similar paper by theorists D Rubin and K Greene called “Gender-Typical Style in Written Language” women may also strive to be more honest in their communication (an exclamation mark can equate to a sense of “I really mean this”). Another theory suggested is that exclamation mark abuse can signal a lack of confidence or stature; and that because one can argue that men are naturally more confident, they therefore tend to refrain more from using exclamation marks.
All very interesting linguistic stuff which fuels my ongoing interest in how digital communication and the semantic web is evolving human language patterns.
In a previous blog I summarised the Online Language Pathways research by CDA, which demonstrated that the language used when searching is influenced by brand content and messaging, but also that search language becomes more ‘mechanical’ during the information filtering process. And while punctuation usage is restricted to email communication, we’ve come a long way from the Latin origins of the exclamation mark (the first one appeared in print around 1400), which, it is argued, derives from the Latin word “Io” meaning joy.
Well, I’m all for adding a bit of joy to email communication! But then, I’m a friendly and excitable woman!
Tags: digital communication, email written language, online punctuation, Semantic Web
