Ten Rules in Ten Days - Rule 5: Keep your exclamation points ­under control.

Keep your exclamation points ­under control.You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

New writers love exclamation points. I guess they're afraid that if they don't have them, readers won't understand that the statement is an exclamation. As I've said in at least two of the previous rules, the reader should be able to tell the nature of the statement from t...