Every exclamation mark is a small request to be believed.

Look at the last sale post from almost any shop in your city. Flat 40 per cent off. Hurry. Limited stock. Every line ends in an exclamation mark, sometimes three, and the whole thing reads like someone shouting across a mall in the hope that volume will do what the offer couldn't.

The mark is meant to carry surprise, or a raised voice. In marketing copy it usually carries worry: that the reader won't care, that the line isn't enough, that someone in the office will say it lacks energy. Readers hear the worry. That is all nervous copy is: words that keep checking whether you are still listening.

What the mark is doing

Read a line aloud with its exclamation mark, then without. “Our new menu is here” with one sounds like a waiter who has been told to be cheerful. With a full stop it sounds like a restaurant that has a new menu. The second is the one you would walk into.

The mark is doing a job the sentence should have done. If the news is good, a plain sentence carries it. If the news only sounds good with the mark, the fix is a more specific sentence: “The new menu has eleven dishes, and four of them are from Kutch.” Nobody needs to be told to be excited about that. It is already more interesting than the punctuation was.

When we wrote about giving feedback on a draft, we said a request for more energy is often a request for exclamation marks. There isn't one anywhere on this page, and you probably didn't miss it.

If a line only sounds good with an exclamation mark, the line needs work.

The quieter signs

Exclamation marks are the loud habit. The quiet ones do the same damage:

• The apology. “Sorry for the delay” when there was no delay. “Sorry to bother you” at the top of a broadcast. A business that apologises in every message teaches customers to expect something worth apologising for. We made the same point about the first line of a cold mail: an apology spends the reader's time asking permission to spend it.
• The hedge. “We try to deliver within three days.” “We aim to respond quickly.” “Hopefully you'll find something you like.” If you deliver in three days, say so. If you don't, say what you do. “Try” tells the reader the excuse is already written.
• The pile of adjectives. Fresh, authentic, delicious, homemade. Four words in a row is four people agreeing loudly, and the reader believes none of them. One fact, “made this morning in a kitchen in Paldi”, does the work of all four. It is the same trouble as the nine words every brand overuses: big words fill the space where a fact should be.
• The capitals. BOOK NOW. LAST FEW SEATS. On a phone, capitals read as a raised voice in a room where nobody else had spoken yet.

Where it comes from

Almost nobody writes nervous copy on purpose. It comes from a draft that has been read by too many worried people. One thinks it is flat and adds a mark. Another thinks it sounds rude and adds a sorry. A third wants to be safe and adds “try to”. Every edit is reasonable on its own. Together they make the brand sound like a junior on their first call with a big client.

The other source is a missing fact. Adjectives and exclamation marks are what a writer reaches for when nobody has told them the delivery time, the ingredient or the number of years. Give them the fact and most of the noise leaves on its own.

Confidence is mostly subtraction

Calm copy sounds the way a good doctor talks. A dentist in Navrangpura who says “this will sting for a second” is more reassuring than one who says “don't worry at all, it's absolutely nothing”. The first is specific and expects to be believed. The second is working hard, and you start to wonder why.

You don't need new words to sound sure of yourself. You mostly need to remove some. A full stop instead of the mark. “We deliver in three days” instead of “we try to”. One fact instead of four adjectives. One thank you, at the end, meant.

A ten-minute edit

1. Find the marks. Open your homepage, your last ten posts and the reply your team sends on WhatsApp. Replace every exclamation mark with a full stop and read each line again. Put a mark back only where you would raise your voice across a counter, which in a business message is almost never.
2. Find the nerves. Search for sorry, just, try, hopefully and kindly. For each one, ask whether something has actually gone wrong. If nothing has, the word goes.
3. Find the piles. Wherever two or more adjectives sit together, replace them with one thing a customer could check.

Someone on your team will say the new version sounds flat. Ask them: flat compared to what? Usually the answer is the version that was shouting, and no customer ever asked to be shouted at. If a line still sounds flat with a full stop, the line needs a better fact, and no punctuation mark was going to supply it.