Superfluous Punctuation

Emails. Instant Messaging. Cell Phone Texting. These wonderful new additions to our modern lives add a very nice level of convenience that I truly enjoy. I particularly like the fact that I can communicate easily, cheaply and nearly instantaneously with family and friends hundreds of miles away using these devices. However, as much as I love the convenience of these mediums I really hate what has happened to the clarity of communications as we have gotten used to these devices. We use fragmented sentences, poor grammar, atrocious spelling and a host of other evils and write them off as "typos" or "from my phone" or "I was in a rush". Much more could be said on this topic of the sad state of writing in these mediums in general, but not today. Today I want to rant about a particularly vile manifestation of "internetese", the superfluous use of punctation.

Ever get an email/text/IM fragment that looked something like this?

"Hey!!!!! What you doing??????????????????"
"Can you believe that guy just ate his own wanker?!?!?!?!?!?!?!"

I have. Damnit, and far too many times. Far, far too many times. And I am sick and tired of it. Some of the offenders have been reprimanded. Unfortunately those sharp verbal rebukes have had little to no effect on behavior. *SIGH*. Therefore, I will vent my frustration in this blog post and rail against my nameless foe upon the "Interweb".

Let me just start off by saying that there is absolutely no reason or excuse for using more than one punctuation mark at the end of any single sentence. No. Just stop right there. Don't even waste time trying to think of scenarios, situations, and exceptions. THERE ARE NONE. End of story. Now, having said that, how is the writer to convey their tone and level of excitement/agitation without the now outlawed extra punctuation? I'm glad you asked. There are a number of tools in the modern writer's toolbox for expressing such things. Let's start with an example sentence and see how we might fix it up.

"Can you believe that guy just ate his own wanker?!?!?!?!?!?!?!" - all bad

1. The judicious use of capitalization. One must be careful here for fear of falling into another bad practice, that of yelling at your intended audience inappropriately. It is a widely accepted convention in internet text communications that capitalization means a raised voice or yelling.
For example:
"Can you believe that guy just ate his own WANKER?" - acceptable
"CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT GUY JUST ATE HIS OWN WANKER?" - passable, but to be avoided and only used when you really mean to scream at the audience.

2. The proper use of cuss words. A simple way to raise the tone of any sentence from flat to high is just to cuss at the audience. Watch:

"Can you believe that guy just ate his own fucking wanker?" - acceptable

3. A variation of 2 is to pseudo-cuss. Use this technique if you are a sally, jessy, ninny, panty-waste, or a wanker.

"Can you believe that guy just ate his own frigging wanker?" - acceptable, but lame

4. Italics, bolding, font size and other text formatting. Simple, elegant, and most notably not the useless repetition of a punctuation mark.

"Can you believe that guy just ate his own wanker?" - acceptable

5. The "Interrobang". Caution: this may appear at first to be a violation of the single punctuation mark rule. It is not. It is a single punctation mark formed with two characters. It is a new punctation mark created for the internet age. It is extremely powerful and the only acceptable way one may place more than one punctuation character at the end of a sentence. Regard the beauty of it:

"Can you believe that guy just ate his own fucking wanker?!" - HAWT