Field guide / Rule 11 — Punctuation
A single exclamation point already carries the whole emphasis; a second one adds nothing but volume. Stacked marks — !!!, ??? — read as shouting, and in a set document they read as a document that got away from its author.
Punctuation is a signal, and a signal repeated loses its edge. The exclamation point is already the strongest mark of tone there is — say it twice and the reader hears not more force but less control. One well-placed ! lands; a row of them is a raised voice on the page. The same holds for the question mark: Really??? asks nothing extra, it just fidgets.
There is a deliberate exception. ?! (and !?) is not a repeated mark — it is two different ones doing two jobs at once, the astonished question. Writers reach for it on purpose, so our rule only ever collapses a run of the same mark and leaves a mixed pair untouched.
A run of two or more of the same terminal mark becomes a single one. Anything that isn’t a repeat — a lone mark, the mixed ?!, or punctuation inside code — is left exactly as it was.
A run of exclamation points collapses to one.
The same for a doubled question mark.
The mixed pair is a real mark — left untouched.
Inside code, punctuation is literal — skipped entirely.
In short
One exclamation point, one question mark — a stack of them is volume, not emphasis. We collapse any run of the same mark to a single one, and we keep the expressive ?! and every mark inside your code exactly as written.
Want to see it on your own text? Convert a document and read the cleanup report — every mark we collapsed is counted there.