I recently read Julian Barnes' book, Departure(s) where he talks about the use of exclamation marks, and how he abhors them. I used to use them a lot, but now try to think of more energetic ways of writing to describe the feeling of an exclamation.

As an aside, the Karori Community Facebook page used to be I Love Karori!!!. In our family we would speak out the punctuation. It sounded better to say 'exclamation mark' three times after the title. The exclamation marks disappeared overnight, about 18 months ago. I was devastated!!!