Now, For The Exclamation Mark!

First there were question marks, therefore, I had to note Florence Hazrat's How to Exclaim! from The Millions.

I do not use exclamation point, other than maybe when I have a character yelling. Ms. Hazrat proposes five ways for rehabilitating the point. Some points I found worth considering from the article:

The exclamation point falls flat. All the expectation and excitement rushing into the uplifting mark, and then—nothing. The marling keeps on swimming for another 100 pages. This punctuation tsunami lifts itself out of nowhere and goes nowhere. Hemingway plays tricks on our feelings with this exclamation anti-climax, standing starkly out as the only ! in the novel, just as the rest of the lonely 59 exclamation points dotting Hemingway’s entire works. !‘s presence can produce big emotions. And so can its absence.

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And with exclamations reduced to, or returning, a wordless sigh, Hopkins brings ! home to its roots: expressing admiration and wonder. Around 700 years ago, in the small town of Urbisaglia in central Italy, the scholar and poet Alpoleio felt moved to introduce a punctuation mark that flagged up emotion rather than simply syntax. Annoyed that people were reading exclamations like statements or questions, he suggested appending an emotional sentence with a dot plus apostrophe dangling from the line above. He called the new sign the punctus admirativus, the point of admiration or wonder. That was the birth of the exclamation point, and it’s precisely what writers know: A strategic ! (or several) can make your readers go “wow!” So, whenever you’re unsure of whether to stick your neck out and shout or not, remember Jane Austen and Salman Rushdie: permission to exclaim granted!

!!!

sch 10/14