Writing Lessons/Rules

I used an exclamation mark in a LinkedIn post last month. And oh. My. Lanta. The people of LinkedIn were not happy. I love that writers feel so strongly about punctuation marks. As an editor and writer myself, it makes my heart hum when people discuss exclamation marks, em dashes, and semicolons with passion. But what makes me sad are all the unnecessary rules and judgments we writers can sometimes add to these very innocent punctuation marks. I've heard it said before that s