Mad about exclamation marks!

Sometimes, I receive e-mail and text messages with nothing but exclamation marks (lots of them) at the end of almost every sentence. I might find the odd question mark randomly thrown into the mix, but no full stops. It’s as if the senders only took one grammar lesson at school, the one covering exclamation marks, and didn’t go any further.

“These look cute!” one of these lovers of exclamation marks must have said, during that lone grammar lesson. “People will surely pay attention when I use these as my default punctuation. I can also use a lot of them when I want to emphasise something funny or unusual! So people will know to pay even more attention! Life is too short to waste on unnecessary punctuation!!!!!”