One way to improve our writing is to avoid our defaults

I was reading a recent Frank Bruni post where he began a new feature on his blog called "Words Worth Sidelining," and it happened to be right when I was reading some college assignments where I found myself counseling my young charges to avoid using exclamation marks so often (actually, my advice is to avoid them always unless in informal birthday messages on Facebook, where all bets are off).

Three words that Bruni and many of his readers object to due to overuse are "amazing" and "perfect," with a bonus British expression -- "brilliant" -- added in.

He noted, and I agree, that there is nothing terrible about their use in conversations -- they are polite and won't lead to fights -- but the language is better served when we don't overuse some words, thus diminishing their power.

I would add "unique" to the list, certainly, since the meaning of the word is plainly "one and only one."  "Perfect" is related, since the adjective should reflect a peak... nothing can be better.

Brilliant and amazing, as they are commonly used in England and America, respectively, have become default terms showing approval... the same way "Nice!" or "Awesome" have evolved into almost invisible praise, much like "Have a nice day.".

For many college students and younger, a constant barrage of exclamation marks is seen as being friendly and supportive,  I would guess. But when we start using them after EVERY sentence! Well! That starts getting to be a bit much! 

My argument to college writers is that if we work on our diction and syntax a bit, we don't have to rely on a stray punctuation mark to stand in for the lack of excitement in our ideas.

Interestingly, avoiding using exclamation marks will never damage our prose and the students who read my comments asking them to avoid their use find it quite easy to stop... at least in my classes. 

It's nice to have some cut and dried rules, I suppose. 

The following is not quite so "cut and dried," but I also find myself constantly suggesting to students that they don't need to use "I believe" all the time -- same with "in my opinion" or "I think." We get it. It's your writing. You don't need to hedge your bets, so to speak. Adding those little disclaimers rob our claims of some of their power.

A writer might be thinking, this ideas is "just my opinion," so please don't attack me. It's a way to step away from being directly responsible for an opinion and avoiding criticism.

But what readers always want are facts and strong claims, and then some support for those claims. 

I guess a person could say, "I think I love you," but "I love you" is more direct and contains no hedging at all.