Stop Using THIS In Your Writing
The Amplified Impact Podcast
November 16th, 2023
I’ve got a writing tip that can seriously amp up your game in emails, social media, and even business content.
Here it is…go easy on the exclamation points and emojis. Seems small but it’s going to have a huge impact.
Our texting habits have made us overuse these.
But in professional writing, they often weaken your message. One exclamation point too many can change your tone completely.
Using them sparingly maintains impact.
Emotions? Excitement? Learn to convey these with words and structure.
Keep it balanced. Let your words speak.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“Save those exclamation points and emojis for particular moments of impact that you’re driving towards. When every line has them, it loses the impact.”
– Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino:
Yo, what’s up, everybody? Welcome back to the podcast. I just want to share with you guys a quick little writing tip that is going to drastically improve the quality of your words, whether that is in an email, it’s in a social media post, or some kind of landing page for a product. This one little tip, it’s gonna seem small, but it’s, it’s actually quite important. It’s very impactful, and it’s top of mind right now, because this is a lesson I’ve had to continually rehash with a couple people on our team. And over at Invictus in particular, is we’re like sending out investor communications every quarter, or we’re pitching different deals and trying to get investors into those opportunities. The tip is this. You need to be very careful, very intentional, and very sparing when you use things like exclamation points and emojis. And that might seem really silly and obvious, but I assure you that this is way more prevalent in people’s writing than I think they even realize.
Anthony Vicino:
Just because the ubiquity of writing on your phone and texting in particular, I think, has changed the dynamic, the medium. I think people are just so much more comfortable these days using emojis and using over the top punctuation, because it can be very easy to misread tone or context in a text message. And you probably had this before with like, a loved one, a friend, a family member, where you wrote out this long thing, and then they responded and you took it one way and they meant it a completely different way. And one exclamation point can signal one thing, two exclamation point signals an entirely different thing. And there’s studies that show women tend to use emojis much more emojis and exclamation points much more to kind of diffuse tension, potential tension within a message, especially if they’re sending something that might be deemed critical or judgmental in some way. So, like in the form of a work email, if they’re sending it over to Bob and accounting, they try to make themselves less aggressive by overcompensating with exclamation points in particular. And I think we all do this right. You’ll make a message and then you’ll put that little emoji at the end, a little winky face, just to make sure that they understand the context of it.
Anthony Vicino:
But in my experience, those forms of, we’ll say, contextual aids just weakens the writing overall, specifically when it’s in the context of, say, social media post or it’s in an email or it’s in some kind of business formal occasion. If you want to be a more impactful writer, you need to learn how to be able to convey emotions and convey excitement with the words and the structure itself without having to overly rely on double exclamation points or triple exclamation points or the mind blowing emoji. And you can do this through different formatting techniques with ellipses are a great strategy for this. But again, ellipses, which is just the dot dot dot kind of a trailing off at the end. That can be a very nice way to non aggressively signal like, hey, I’m open to your suggestions or thoughts, but it can also be a cliffhanger. And you can use this in different dynamics to get your readers to engage and keep reading through your post or in the context of an email, to kind of take a little bit of the fire or the aggression out of it if you’re afraid of it being misconstrued, but you need to be really intentional. I think generally if you have more than one exclamation point in an email, it’s far, far too many, right? And it’s very easy to get over the top with this because you go, hey Julie, exclamation point, just thinking about you, exclamation point, what are you up to? Blah blah blah, exclamation point. Like, next thing you know, everything has an exclamation point, and when everything is exclaimed, then nothing is really exclaimed.
Anthony Vicino:
And so you need to save those for particular moments of impact that you’re driving towards. And generally, I think emojis weaken your writing entirely. I’m guilty of this as well. But generally you see social media posts, say, on LinkedIn, some people like to use an emoji on Every single different line of the post. I think that is overkill, and I don’t think it’s helpful. I think it actually detracts from your brand and kind of makes you look a little bit more amateur. And so over relying on those, they can become a crutch. Look at your words.
Anthony Vicino:
Figure out how can I tell this in a more compelling way that makes the context clear within the sentence or the structure itself, without having to rely on the cheap aid of the exclamation point? And sometimes you do. Sometimes a great exclamation point or an emoji can really drive home the point, but when every line has that, then it loses the impact. It’s like a pinch of salt goes a really long way. So just wanted to share that tip with you guys. Hope it brings you a little bit of value. As always, appreciate you being here again. If you want to learn more about writing, I started working with my budy Andrew Kirby, great creator. We’re working on a project right now that we’re going to be launching in January.
Anthony Vicino:
It’s going to be, I’m not going to talk about it too much quite yet because it’s still a little bit ways, so I’m going to tease it here. But it’s a community of people that are looking to level up their skills and all different aspects of life, specifically what we call the four spheres of influence, which is mindset, health, wealth and skills. So stay tuned for that. If you want to learn more about that, we’re going to be setting up a landing page here shortly. I’ll give you that in one of the next episodes. And you guys can go and jump on the waitlist for that. But it’s going to be awesome. I’m really excited about it.
Anthony Vicino:
We’re still just getting it off the ground right now and going to be running hard throughout the month of December to get everything up and running for a January launch. It’s going to be fantastic. So stay tuned for that, guys. But as always, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for being here. We’ll catch you guys tomorrow, but until then, stay hyper focused, my friends.
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