A BBC article discusses the use – or should that be overuse – of the exclamation mark!!!!!!!!!!! Ahem…
Elmore Leonard has died at the age of 87. The crime novelist really didn’t like exclamation marks, notes Finlo Rohrer.
His 10 rules of writing from 2001 are arguably as famous as any of his novels. Point five reads: “Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.” He wasn’t the only enemy. “Cut out all these exclamation points,” F Scott Fitzgerald urged. “An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”
Generally, I’m with Elmore Leonard and F Scott Fitzgerald on this one. My prose tends to be exclamation mark free for the most part. Generally, I’ll reserve it for dialogue in my fiction, but only then rarely. Otherwise, I try to use my vocabulary and sentence construction to convey my meaning. I will sometimes italicise to emphasise a point, but rarely use the exclamation mark. Others, though, differ and it is not unusual to receive a text or email with sentences that end with an unnecessary exclamation mark. Indeed, I have a young friend who will occasionally send me a text – and if each sentence did not end with a string of these, I would begin to suspect that she had fallen victim to the body snatchers.
As with emoticons, there might be a gender difference. When he surveyed a collection of texts, Crystal noticed females used exclamation marks four times as often as males.
Without wishing to generalise… oh, go, on, okay, I will then, I seem to have noticed this trend as well. Not that I am counting or anything so couldn’t say if it is four times as many, of course… Still, so long as they get their apostrophes in the right place, I’m relaxed…
BOLLOX!!!!!
Of course, it does not help when a web site does not offer the option of italics, etc. What do you do then?
You can here – just use the usual html tags.
There’s a contributor to a forum I use whose posts are generally quite sensible, but who is constantly spoiling the effect by using too many exclamation marks!!!!!
And he’s a middle-aged man, not a girl!!!!!!
Incidentally, I saw this on Twitter:
Exclamation rules of thumb…
! – good
!! – excited
!!! – awesome
!!!! – starting to get creepy
!!!!! – avoid them
!!!!!! – owns 20 cats
Not had any cat pics from your good self recently, Mr L – hope they are all thriving >^..^<
Would then, something become even more interrogative if there were a multiplicity of question marks?
PS
What’s wrong with having 20 cats, if you can afford to look after them properly?
PPS
As a ‘point of order’, you don’t have cats:- they have you. ❗
The cats are fine. Working six days a week, I haven’t had the time to go out hunting them with the camera. I’ve got some time next week, so will probably do so then. Nice to think the pics are appreciated.
I am a guilty !!!!! user. I love the !!!!! I know I am a bloody disgrace!!!!
Because I am dyslexic I do find punctuation a little tricky and almost a closed book in many circumstances my brain just doesn’t compute it and generally I need to check and recheck so many times I then get my self in such a dither I discover I am making more errors than I am putting right.
However that said I think I would still be an excessive !!!! user it looks nice and breaks up the monotony 😛
Thank you and kindest regards!
I had noticed
A very timely and most welcome post, LR – but shouldn’t that be ‘apostrophe’s’? My green-grocer thinks it ought to be, but then again, I’ll just get me coat!!!
Probably wise. 😉