And May Strunk & White Have Pity on My Soul

I am singlehandedly destroying the exclamation point. Oh, it begs me to stop, but I power through the whinnying pleas and mash that bruised combination of Shift + 1 until the paint has worn off the keyboard where my plunging little pinkie makes contact.

I write internet advertisements called tags, each one no more than ten words long. You've seen them, oh, you've seen them. They glitter at the top and right side of every internet search you've done in the last four years. You've wondered if they're legit, if they're laden with viruses and Trojans, if they can actually deliver on their promise to make you a six-figure salary all in the comfort of your own home—and just in your free time too!—and your fears are well founded.

Anyone who hasn't had their head up their ass since the dawn of the internet age knows that those pop-up ads are replete with exclamation points. "Buy NOW!" and "1000s in Stock!!!" eventually gave way to more daring eye-poppers of punctuation like "$ave Ton$ @ BargainBa$ement!!@!!"; and it doesn't seem as if it will get any better soon.

I have now become one of those punctuation pimps, putting my exclamation-mark hoes out there in public to strut their stuff just so I can make a few dollars, when all they want is to edge up alongside someone, excuse me, something that actually deserves their presence. I am a copywriter working for a large internet advertising agency, and this missive comes as an admission of my guilt. I pray that this confession will expunge my blotched soul, that it will prevent the wanton exclamatory abuse of my professional life from bleeding into my hobby of writing prose. God knows I'll never be the next Hemingway—or even the next Crichton for that matter—if I'm littering the page with exclamation points like so many cigarette butts on my lawn.

I must admit, I'm scared: today I glanced at my to-do list I write every morning and found, to my horror, an erect dash over a dot next to, of all things, "Go to meditation class." Of all the activities on my to-do list, one as calming and serene as Introduction to Buddhist Meditation class was hardly deserving of the thunderous call to arms that an exclamation point brings. It's when things like this started happening that I realized it's only a matter of time before I'm shimmying down the street in tattered rags and barking every third or fourth nonsensical word to passersby.

I can see the future headlines in esteemed scientific journals and pop science publications alike: "Exclamation Point Surge in Internet Age Believed to Have Caused 4-Fold Rise in Schizophrenia Rates."

It's not my fault though—at least not entirely my fault—the way it's not Paul Tibbets' fault that he depressed the button that opened the hatch that dropped the bomb that killed 140,000 Japanese citizens in a flash of brilliance and stupidity. He was just following orders, regardless of how inane those orders were.

I am simply the Office Space version of Paul Tibbets. I follow orders. At least while they're watching. So I do what I was trained to do: I insert exclamation points when a period will suffice—nay, when a period is grammatically presupposed. Almost every ten-word blurb I write has at least one exclamation point, splattered helplessly next to half-phrases that make sense only to product-hungry stay-at-home moms and eBay profiteers lounging in their underwear at their kitchen table, desperately searching for that one possession that will make them whole.

I know that one day, my boss will come to my corner of the office, where I sit with three other copywriters who churn out the same steaming piles as I, day in, day out. He with the company car and the MBA and the same breakfast and lunch every day since I've cared to notice, he will look at us with a solemn expression and puffy, reddened eyes and say, "It's done. We've killed it."

And, as if waking from a long nap, I will wonder, has he been crying?