Holy exclamation points!

Today my husband & I received an email here at Chez Crackers that had us scratching our heads a bit. Here is what it said:

"Rita is not feeling well. Connie and I may go over to see her this afternoon.
Hank said she had a blockage of the bowel!"

Now in all honesty, I do feel quite bad for Rita & I hope that she will be feeling better soon. My issue here is not with Rita or her bowel predicament. The thing that I found odd was the punctuation. I can't help but imagine the writer excitedly screaming the last line of the email (& I feel pretty strongly that Rita probably would not want this information talked about in a loud or excited manner).

I am certainly not an English teacher, nor am I a very proficient writer (as evidenced by my terrible grasp of grammar in this and previous posts). That being said though, I think I am not alone here when I say, perhaps that sentence could have wrapped it up with a simple period.

I need to tread a little carefully, because I myself am an abuser of the exclamation point. Often, when proofing an email before sending it on, I find that I have used exclamation marks at the end of almost every sentence. Why is this? Am I really that excited about what I am saying? Does the statement "Hope you are well" really merit 2 exclamation points from me?

Perhaps this problem is genetic. I do remember receiving cards from my aunts while I was younger that read:

Happy Birthday Karen !!!!!!

(Each word would be underlined at least 3 times. The word Happy would be underlined 5 times for greater emphasis).

No matter what the reason, I hereby vow to do a better job monitoring my punctuation to ensure it is appropriate to the actual sentiment being conveyed. I will try to make a stand & fight the genetic coding that seems to just beg me to end every sentence with an exclamation point. I think I can do it, I really do!!

Oh, and Rita: I hope you are feeling better soon!!!!