In 1895, the American writer Mark Twain published an essay in which he warned writers about the overuse of exclamation points. He believed it made them look as if they were laughing at their own jokes.

What do you think Twain would think about the frequency with which people use exclamation points today? What are your personal “rules” for using punctuation marks like periods, commas, question marks and exclamation points in text messages? What about in other forms of writing?

In a March 1 article, “When Your Punctuation Says It All (!),” Jessica Bennett writes:

It’s not just that each of us is more delicately choosing our characters, knowing that an exclamation point or a colon carries more weight in our 140-character world. Or even that our punctuation suddenly feels like hyperbole (right?!?!?!?!?!) because we’ve lost all audible tone.

Those things are true. But it’s also as if a kind of micro-punctuation has emerged: tiny marks in the smallest of spaces that suddenly tell us more about the person on the other end than the words themselves (or, at least, we think they do).

Take the question mark. Recently, a friend I had dinner plans with sent a text to ask “what time” we were meeting. We’d been organizing this meal for weeks; a half-dozen emails back and forth. And yet the question — sans the mark — felt indifferent, almost cold. Couldn’t she at least bother to insert the necessary character?

Of course, had she inserted too many marks, that may have been a problem, too, as there is suddenly a very fine line between appearing overeager (too much punctuation) and dismissive (not enough).

Even the period, once the most benign of the punctuation spectrum, now feels aggressive. And the exclamation point is so ubiquitous that “when my girlfriends don’t use an exclamation point, I’m like ‘What’s wrong, you O.K.?’ ” said Jordana Narin, a 19-year-old student in New York.

“Girlfriends” may be a key word there, as women are more likely to use emotive punctuation than men are. Yet lately I’ve tried to rein my own effusiveness in, going as far as to insert additional punctuation into existing punctuation in an effort to soften the marks themselves.

So instead of responding to a text with “Cant wait!!” I’ll insert a space or two before the mark — “Cant wait !!” – for that extra little pause. Sometimes I’ll make the exclamation point a parenthetical, as a kind of after thought (“Can’t wait (!)”). A friend inserts an ellipses — “Can’t wait … !!” — so, as she puts it, “it’s less intense.”

… And so we’ve begun to think our friends are angry when they respond with a period, or weird when they capitalize the starts of their sentences. We insert extra letters (“loooool,” “sooooo,” “hiiiiiiii”) — what linguists call “affective lengthening” — to convey intensity, and remove them when we want to be aloof.

“One girl told me she uses just ‘h’ to say ‘hi’ when she’s mad at someone,” said Rachel Simmons, a writer in Northampton, Mass., who runs a leadership program for teenage girls.

We tease in our email subject lines (“GUESS who I just ran into … ”) and punctuate in place of words (“!!!” instead of “amazing!”). (One friend told me he types a single “…” when he wants to convey “deadpan straight face.”)

Catherine Wise, a 31-year-old lawyer in Manhattan, said her rules are simple: all lowercase letters “unless you are a narc or an old person”; emojis in threes (except when you’re trying to prove a point); ALL CAPS for emphasis; an extra “g” to OMG “depending on how excited [or] shocked I am. Like omggggg.”

Tessa Lyons, a 25-year-old in San Francisco, said her mother uses ellipses when she wants to convey a “casual, youthful tone.” “So her emails … ” Lyons said, “ … often read … like this…”

And unless you want to be viewed as straight-up “geriatric,” as one friend put it, best to avoid the comma at all costs. “The only person who still does this is my dad, who also signs his texts ‘ILY, Daddy,’ as if I didn’t know who was texting me in the first place,” said Ms. Narin. ILY, she explained, is the acronym for “I love you,” though trust me when I say that no human under 50 is using this particular shortcut.

“I don’t use commas and I don’t check my voice mail,” said Ms. Simmons, 40. “But it’s such a contradiction that you’re supposed to drop the comma after the ‘hi’ and then keep the ‘?’ after ‘what time.’ And then you insert 16 different emoji?!”

… There was a time when “O.K.” was a simple abbreviation for the word. But “O.K.” became “OK” when the extra periods got to be too much work, which became “ok” as people stopped capitalizing, making the original “O.K.” (as well as “OK”) feel strangely formal. But now even “ok” feels kind of harsh, so we’ve picked up ways to soften it: “ok!,” “okieeee” or “kk.”

Anne Trubek, a professor of rhetoric and composition at Oberlin College, said, “My students told me that ‘k’ without a period in a text means the person is mad at you. Also that jk doesn’t really mean jk anymore,” “Who can keep up?!”

Nobody, really. Yet in the end, it may be the very technology to create the chaos that ultimately resolves it.