How to Decide Whether to Use an Exclamation Mark in That Email

— -- If you have ever agonized over whether you should use that exclamation mark in an email, you can breathe a sigh of relief.

Marketing and sales software company HubSpot, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has created a brilliant flowchart called, "Should I Use an Exclamation Mark?" that will guide you through those dubious communication conundrums -- especially handy for that message to your boss or prospective employer.

"Don't ask punctuation to do a word's job, is what we're saying," HubSpot's chief writer and editor Beth Dunn writes. "It dilutes your message, makes you look unprofessional, and leaves you with nowhere to go when you actually do need an exclamation mark. But how's a web writer to know when an exclamation mark is actually called for?"

You can see the full flowchart here, which dispenses wisdom such as: hoping to generate excitement is a "terrible reason to use an exclamation mark" and the writer "only gets one exclamation mark for saying 'Hey!'"

"Overused all over the web, these hardworking little symbols are the smiley faces of the punctuation world," Dunn writes. "We rely on them far too heavily when what we really need to do is go back to our words and try to make them convey more precisely what we're trying to say."