Authors Electric

I wrote a similar piece some years back, so I’m plagiarizing my own work with this article. If you guessed that I’m writing about the overuse of the exclamation mark again—you are correct!!! The Internet has made communicating so easy there is a tendency to disregard grammar. That goes for texts, emails, blogs, and comments on all social media platforms. In today’s electronic age, the skill to communicate is not only determined by how well we write, but also by how familiar we are with emojis like smiley or sad faces, acronyms like ROFL, LOL, ICYMI, and bolding of words to create emphasis. All these tools are meant to help us express our thoughts more clearly, but have they made us lazy writers in the process?  When someone writes a sentence using all uppercase letters, I imagine them screaming at me. If they also bold it, they’re screaming even louder. If they punctuate the sentence with several exclamation marks … it’s downright deafening.  The Chicago Manual of Style says...