When I was teaching seminars in the United Kingdom, I learned that they call the period at the end of sentences a "full stop." Wham, it hit me. That means that the next sentence is a different thought on the same topic.
Keep that in mind when deciding your stopping points. Today's tendency is to make sentences short, but sometimes doing so breaks apart thoughts that belong together. Consider the following:
I got my dog from the pound. He was too cute to resist.
These two sentences are related to one another and should not be separated by a full stop. They need to be linked with a conjunction or a semicolon (more on the semicolon later).
I got my dog from the pound because he was too cute to resist. Ah, much better.
Question marks and exclamation points are also thought stoppers. Use them the same way you would a full stop (period).
One more comment:
DO NOT overuse exclamation points. If your text is not exciting, adding an exclamation point (or three) at the end certainly doesn't improve it. Use them only when something is genuinely exciting or emotional.
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