Hello!!! Just me here, fooling around with random thoughts! About—you may have guessed by now— exclamation points!!! Though, as someone who questions everything, question marks would be a more appropriate topic for me, I’m feeling inundated, overwhelmed, bombarded, snowed-under and besieged with those dramatic, attention-seeking punctuations: exclamation points. (Redundancy may be a topic for a future spiel). Exclamation points are being overused. Unless you are communicating with a whole different set of people than I, you may have noticed too. Not that I count the little rascals, but a recent email I received of 661 words was punctuated with 18 exclamation points. And in my opinion, there was nothing in that email worth exclaiming about.
This phenomenon is somewhat understandable, for they are the most attractive of all punctuation marks. While semi-colons and colons do make an attempt to rise above the fray, the rest of them, commas and periods especially, sort of lie lazily at the bottom of the line. Question marks begin to ascend but then balloon out like a kite caught in the wind. But exclamation marks soar!!! Literally and figuratively, they attempt to spice up the mundane sentence, literally rising to the top of the line and, figuratively, inserted to convey a sense of excitement. As in “Laura is expecting!” Very suitable, that. But what if Laura is only expecting to go to the grocery store? Or expecting a delivery from Amazon?
An email or text containing what is clearly an abundance of exclamation points, either one at the end of every line or grouped in 3’s!!! or 5’s!!!!! or 10’s!!!!!!!!!! causes problems to arise—like the exclamation marks themselves. A problem I face is: will I offend the writer if I don’t exclaim back? Am I showing a lack of enthusiasm? Suppose you really do care that Laura is expecting (assuming we’re talking about a baby here)? If you say, “That is good news” or “Happy to hear it” and just plop down a period (or even question, “Wait, who is Laura?”) is leaving out exclamation marks in your response going to seem rude? Are you demonstrating that you think their news isn’t all that newsworthy?
Another consideration is that, for some, exclamation points may be the latest lazy-writing filler, a way to bypass thinking, looking for the right expression, the right word. Do we avoid the more difficult creative process of actually explaining why we’re excited or how we agree something is truly important, by dashing off little vertical lines that float above a black dot?
I did minimal research to bring me up to date. Grammar isn’t my forte and what I know of it I learned in the fifth grade. Mostly now, I just ask my husband, a.k.a. The Grammar King. (He reads The Elements of Style in bed at night before falling asleep.) But all on my own, I did some research googling until I got bored. Research isn’t my forte either.
Wikipedia, my trusted source, says, “…The exclamation mark is a punctuation mark usually used after an interjection or exclamation to indicate strong feelings, or to show emphasis.” They give an example of “Watch out!” Please note that they only use one, even though the person they are warning may be in imminent danger of having pigeon droppings fall on their head, or their hair is already on fire, or a drone is circling them.
I think an exclamation mark (as I’m now calling it) is a wonderful bit of punctuation. Perhaps the best! But not if it’s overused. It loses its value. It’s ultimately ignored. Your statements lose their oomph. If everything is exciting, then nothing is. And it is now being used in the extreme. I’m trying to give them up, or limit their use, and hope that I’m not hurting anyone’s feelings out there because they assume this indicates my lack of enthusiasm (though that may be the case as well).