What’s up, fellow grammar nerds! I read this article in the Guardian about exclamation points via Sullivan over the weekend.  The best bit in the piece:

Carol Waseleski’s unexpectedly diverting paper, Gender and the Use of Exclamation Points in Computer-Mediated Communication, found that women used more exclamation marks than men. But why was this?…[Waseleski] concluded that exclamation marks were not just marks of excitability but of friendliness, and suggested that one reason women use them more than men is because they were, as a gender, less likely to be socially inept, funless egotists …

You can find the complete study on exclamations here!  Waseleski’s paper is more about the emotions exclamation points are used to express than about which gender uses them more, although she does mention that women used significantly more exclamatory phrases than men – 73% of exclamations, with 68% of the data analyzed written by women.  I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t mildly fascinated by the study.

This, of course, inspired me to do another Facebook Gaynalysis on punctuation mark usage! So on Sunday night, after my mom left, I went through 1999 facebook status updates – 529 from gay people, 513 from straight dudes, and 957 from straight bitties – to determine the three groups’ relative utilization of various punctuation marks. Ctrl+F is a godsend.

As I’ve mentioned before, out of my 955 friends, 104 are gay (only 6 of these are ladies), 338 are straight men, and 513 are straight ladies.

The metric I decided to use was the ratio of uses of a punctuation mark per word, inspired by Ellmore Leonards‘ assertion that a writer should not use more than two or three exclamation point per 100,000 words.  My facebook friends clearly do not heed that advice, employing about 11,500 exclamation points per 100,000 words.

In case you were curious, the average length in words of status updates are 11.4 for gays, 11.2 for women, and 10.3 for straight men.

All of the graphs and other data are after the jump!

For the three groups combined, in order of most utilized to least utilized, I found it the following:

Punctuation	Number observed
Full Stop.	7321
Exclamation Point!	2444
Comma,	1740
Dash-	896
Question Mark?	798
“Quotation Mark”	501
(Open Parenthesis	209
Close Parenthesis)	361
Ampersand&	68
*Asteisk	53
Semicolon;	45

This first graph shows the relative usage patterns of the different punctuation marks I looked at. You can click on the image to view it larger in a new window. 

Yes, I realize I forgot to analyze colons.  I had already done all the data analysis, and the data is already gone.  Plus, this isn’t a real study.  My hypothesis would be that gays like colons best if I had analyzed colons.

Ding.

I also left out #’s and @’s, since Twitter corrupts that data.  I hate Twitter. Any other punctuation mark had less than 10 occurrences.

You can look through this flickr set to get a better idea about relative uses of gays, dudes, and bitties for each punctuation mark, as well as total punctuation per word. It’s basically zooming in on the data in the first graph.

Lots of fun conclusions to make!:

• Gays are more inquisitive than straight people!

• Straight dudes are too lazy to type all three letters of the word “and”!

• Straight ladies hate commas and only write run-on sentences!

And here’s the data presented another way, which is as a relative proportion compared to gays, computed by dividing the punctuation per word by gays’ punctuation per word.  This is a better way of looking at comparing the utilization of different punctuation marks since it’s a ratio and not unrelated frequencies.

You’re probably saying to yourself, “Wait, Steve! There are way more close parentheses than open parentheses!!”

You’re right! This discrepancy is due to smiley emoticons (there were no sad emoticons, strangely… apparently I have happy friends).  So here’s a graph that shows the proportion of the time that a close parenthesis is used as an emoticon – a third of the time for ladies, about one time in five for straight dudes:

Would you ever had guessed that straight dudes use (slightly) more smiley faces than gays? 

I don’t know about you people, but I find these results to be pretty fascinating.  From personal experience, I’ve always just intuited that gay brains are basically the midpoint of straight dudes’ and bitties’ brains, especially in terms of emotional processing.  In light of Waseleski’s paper, I find it particularly interesting that gays and ladies use the same amount of exclamation points, which is more than straight men. Contrast that to the findings that gays and straight dudes use similar amounts of emoticons, and you see some evidence for what I’ve thought all along.

Is there anything in particular that sticks out to you?  I’m mostly going to enjoy calling my straight male friends gay for using semicolons from now on.