So Many Exclamation Points!A new style guide says we should pepper our e-mails with them. Really?
Posted Thursday, Aug. 30, 2007, at 2:56 PM ET
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StumbleUponI'm meeting my friend Nick for dinner downtown. At 6:30, I feel that cell-phone-sized hum in my pocket, the sensation these days of incoming language. A text from Nick: "Running 10 mins late." After considering a number of replies (the tried-and-true "All good," the Australian-inflected "No worries," the deeply sarcastic, "I kill u"), I land upon a response: "No prob." Cool, understated—and yet, as I'm on the brink of hitting send, I notice how meager those one-and-a-half words look on my phone. I search my symbols. Ah, that's better. Hear me, poets, we shall dine at 7:10! For, I declare it: "No prob!"
The inboxes of my life teem with such emphatic nullities (i.e., "Sounds good!," "So yes!!," "LOL all over the room!!!"). For a long time, I feared my circle of electronic correspondents succumbed too blithely to the temptation of exclamation. But then I read David Shipley and Will Schwalbe's new manual on e-mail etiquette, Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home. Already billed as the "genre's Strunk and White," Shipley and Schwalbe have attempted to compose a thin volume of good taste in e-communication. To a large extent they succeed. Their book is full of sound advice, such as, "The ease of email encourages unnecessary exchanges," and "The fact that email defies time zones also means that it can defy propriety."
Given Shipley and Schwalbe's evenhandedness, their merry endorsement of exclamation marks comes as a surprise. " 'I'll see you at the conference,' is a simple statement of fact," they write. " 'I'll see you at the conference!' lets your fellow conferee know that you're excited and pleased about the event." To appreciate the unorthodoxy of such counsel one need only have attended a middle-school writing class, where teachers have long forbidden overindulgence in the banger as a kind of literary self-abuse. One ought to show emphasis, the argument goes, through subtlety of style and construction, rather than indicate it with a tail of exclamation points. Elmore Leonard advises, "You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose." Declaim the original Strunk and White, in their legendary sotto voce: "Do not attempt to emphasize simple statements by using a mark of exclamation." Their example? " 'It was a wonderful show!' should be, 'It was a wonderful show.' " (Forget the show—how 'bout that conference!)
Indeed the "wonderful" is what the exclamation point was originally devised to connote. A relatively recent addition to the punctuation clan, it first appeared in print around 1400 and was known until 1700 as a "mark of admiration," though admiration in this case meant something like "wonderment" (of a religious variety). Some scholars believe it derives from the Latin Io (meaning joy). Io, the theory goes, might have been rendered with its second letter under the first, thus producing an exclamation mark.
As Shipley and Schwalbe would have it, the advent of electronic communication creates a greater need for pre-modern wonderment. In their view, the exclamation is no mere crutch for the lazy writer but an essential tonic against the grayness of electronic communication: "Because email is without affect, it has a dulling quality that almost necessitates kicking everything up a notch just to bring it to where it would normally be." But what does it mean that e-mail is without affect? Is a blank piece of loose leaf somehow rich with the stuff?
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Remarks from the Fray:
To those who complain that more exclamation points and emoticons and explanations are hallmarks of bad writing, I say: you are absolutely correct. This isn't about good writing, this is about good communication. Good writing is objectively such, while good communication depends on an understanding of one's audience. In that vein, text messaging and informal emails simply should not be held to the same level as literature or journalism. There does not need to be poetry in that humble prose. Heck, I think it would be a huge achievement just to get people to spell things out rather than adopt the juvenile "C U L8R" style that always rankles me. I'll trade that for more exclamation points any day.
--Sycamancy
(To reply, click here.)
Plenty of things have been jotted throughout time. If I remember correctly, the original cuneiform was used for quickly-out-of-date accounting such as "how many sheep today?" Making copies of tomes was always the extreme end of the written word.
Besides, the ephemeral nature of the communication is poorly correlated with its volume, since the spoken word is the most fleeting form of communication there is. However, most of us choose our words carefully, expressively, and worry about our impact on others. Oh, and we don't always shout.
My guess is that the ! in text is advocated mostly because the text message and email ARE so gray, and so short. That is, you used to have no need of ! in your prose because you could take the time to contextualize and explain your exciting idea. However, a text message is not a novel, so I can see why there would be good reason to advocate a resurgence of punctuation meant to convey tone. If you want to be understood, what's the alternative?
Oh yeah. Emoticons.
--Mangar
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When my mother - a survivor of NYC Catholic schools during the 1950's - had to write papers for school, only 85% of the grade was about the content. The other 15% was form: keeping her margins even on unruled paper, having neat penmanship, not leaving blots with her fountain pen, and/or making sure her i's were dotted on center and her t's crossed perfectly straight. This, the nuns informed her, was because "only God was perfect". Therefore, she was never going to receive a 100% grade on her papers.
In this situation, excessive !'s probably would have meant she was marked off a few points on her content grade as unnecessary punctuation. And then, if she didn't form them correctly, she'd lose another point per imperfect exclamation point.
If that general rule was in effect for e-mails, I think that would make you think twice before using !'s too often.
--Chasmosaur
(To reply, click here.)
I think it's fair to say that here in the fray, new and old, I've given new life to the vast utility that is the exclamation point by using them so sparsely.
In my reviews of movies I haven't seen, if I'm going to give away a surprise ending or a plot twist that I don't even know about, I'll always put in a !!!Spoiler Alert!!! Saves a lot of time, money, and beaucoup hurt feelings.
When I'm about to say something that should be painfully obvious to one of the many insane retards here, I'll start out with a !!!Newsflash!!! to set just the right tone and hit just the right timbre. Very effective, but somewhat harsh, I know.
Another thing I like to do to torture people here is the old slip-in-an-earworm-when-they-least-suspect-it trick. But I, like Xerxes, am a merciful god. So there have been occasions where I've put in a !!!Earworm Warning!!! or 2. I like to think of this use of the points as "the police tape of prose". And I think it's working.
But when you're busy banging your head against a brick wall of total and complete and ubiquitous obtusity (New word!), it's time to bring out the big guns and fight fire with fire. That's right: I'm talking about unleashing the ALLCAPS hounds. Say, "YOU'RE AND IGNORANT DOOFUS!!!" It never works, obviously, because yelling at an idiot is tantamount to barking at a cat, if you get my meaning (I really hope you get my meaning!). I like to think of this tool as "the mutually assured destruction of the written word".
Many of my posts require sound effects, like [cricket chirp], [cue s/fx of can of worms opening here], [Wink!]. See that exclamation point after the "Wink" there? Don't you think that gives it that tongue-in-cheek color a little hue of playfulness that [wink] just doesn't have? That's what I thought!
I mention the sound effects because when you combine the ALLCAPS and multiple exclamation points for s/fx like [kaBLAAAAAAMO!!!], [kerPLOP!!!] and [kaFWOOOOOSH!!!], it's like you're right there, right there in the middle of all that action, whatever that ends up being. Fun!
I've enjoyed our little discussion on the importance of showing a little bit of restraint when it comes to interjections and what not. An exclamation point is like profanity: The more you use the less subtle their effect. Go now and exclaim no more.
P.S. Great Article!
P.P.S. You, light up my life, you give me hope, to carry on...
P.P.P.S. !!!Earworm Warning!!!
P.P.P.P.S. Oops!
--switters
(To reply, click here.)
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