Exclamation Point - Is there a place for you anymore?

Recently, I was told that I use too many exclamation points in my emails. Pssh.

It is an email. Who cares?

But then the author of the email, my grandma of the punctuation police, told me that it appears as if I am shouting at her when I use it.

!!!

Well, first of all there is some truth in that because my grandma is 87 years old and I do shout when talking to her. But I have to admit that shouting was not my intended tone. Instead, I wanted to convey how excited I was to be having lunch with her that day.

This is what my sentence looked like: "Grandma, today is going to be great! I'll meet you at Monicals at about 11. Save a spot for me?!!! Violet has been super cranky, and I can't seem to get moving on time today. Ugh!"

This is how my grandma corrected my sentence: " Grandma, today is going to be great. I will meet you at Monicals at 11. Will you save a seat for me? Violet has been cranky all morning, and I am not keeping good time today."

Then after that correction lashing, my grandma said, "Kelly. I know you are fun and sweet. I should be able to tell that with your words, not your punctuation."

And suddenly I was whiplashed viciously into grad school. All the memos that I had written, all the papers, all the emails to professors, all were heavily laden with exclamation points. It was almost like I had looked back on my life through slow motion, all this time, and no one had told me. Why no intervention? I feel that blame should be placed on everyone else for this....

So then what do you do when you realize that you have a problem and need to fix it? Google. Yep. I started searching for reasons why the exclamation point is so vehemently hated, and I found the following statements:

"The exclamation point is like the horn in your car—use it only when you have to. A chorus of exclamation points says two things about your writing: First, you're not confident that what you're saying is important, so you need bells and whistles to get attention. Second, you don't know a really startling idea when you see one." (Patricia O'Connor - Woe is I)

"I can sum up the problem that most people have with the exclamation point in one short sentence: They use them. That's right. That's the problem. Most often when an exclamation point is used, it is unnecessary. In an academic paper, exclamation points are inappropriate. In fact, in most writing, even in personal letters, one almost never needs an exclamation point. The exclamation point means that you are extremely excited and maybe even shouting. If people talked like they write, with all of the exclamation points, they'd be out of breath and have a sore throat"
(Dr. Rick Walston)

AND

Apparently F. Scott Fitzgerald likened using exclamation marks to laughing at your own jokes (guilty as charged).

Ouch. But don't worry. I did find a positive:

"The use of exclamation marks is appropriate in creative writing. Sometimes they accompany interjections (e.g., ouch, oh, wow), but most times, exclamation marks are used to convey a strong emotion or surprise. However, Even though exclamation marks are accepted in creative writing, the danger is that they can promote lazy “telling” and not vivid “showing” writing. By overusing them, authors are relying on a piece of punctuation as a shortcut for exposition" (Scribendi.com)

Even the positive comes with a warning though.

It may hurt me exponentially, but these are indeed very good points. Is the exclamation point the sign of a nervous or self-conscious writer? Maybe.

I would most definitely fit into that category, and admit that I have fought the urge to have them all over this post. I think the problem I have and maybe other writers have is that we wonder if the correct emotion is conveyed without the use of the exclamation point.

Can my reader understand how important the phrase I'm writing is without the EP? Or how happy I am to be writing to them? I think that, "Hi! How are you!?" is perfectly fine. To me, it reflects the fact that I am indeed very happy to talk to the reader of my note, but in retrospect this does appear to be shouting.

I guess this is what Facebook, Twitter, and texting have done to us although my exclamation point love most definitely originated before the social networks. Alas, it is a hard habit to break, but do I have to break it?

Yes. Sigh.

Exclamation points should be used sparingly in academic writing because the words you choose to write should be strong enough to not need an exclamation point. There are instances where they are acceptable, and that decision has to be made by you. You have to remember your audience. Would I use an exclamation point in a 16 page essay regarding Peter Elbow? (well, man...yeah. Who wouldn't?) Probably not as much as I desperately want to do it.

I would be afraid that my professor wouldn't take me as seriously if I emphasized my all important point with ! UNLESS I had come up with something so ground breaking and so amazing that I decided this one time, this one perfect time, this serendipitous place where my point is going to be absolutely off the charts remarkable is perfectly suited for the EP. Perhaps a sentence like this, "I have found the lost island of Atlantis!"

Now that I know that I have a problem will I stop using the EP so much?

Yes, grumble grumble. I'm even going to go as far as to try and stop using it in my Facebook status updates and my texts. Will people still understand my excitement?

Probably. At least I hope so.

The first step is admitting you have a problem. Anyone else ready to put that life of exclamation points behind you?

My name is Kelly, and I'm addicted to Exclamation Points.

Shew.

Playing to an Audience of ... None?

In my past life, which means before kids--a time that I have to admit I struggle to remember, I was an actor.

The company that I was a part of performed on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights and would then also have a Sunday matinee. It became very easy to know what kind of audience to expect on each of the performances.

Thursday nights the crowd would be alive because it was close to the weekend, and their hopes were high! Friday nights crowds were always snoozers because the people were always too tired from the week at work to react to anything anymore. The audience on Saturday night was always fun. After all they had relaxed all day and were in weekend mode. And Sundays audience were referred to as the "Blue Hairs" and would seldom react to anything at all but generally seemed pleased.

As actors we had to adjust the way that we performed so that it would compliment the blah or excited audience. This was easy to achieve, and we all did it effortlessly, and this mindset has transitioned into how I adjust my voice for an audience while writing scholarly papers.

However, this task is not easy for some people, and I have heard students in the Writing Center complain about it. It goes something like this, "A new semester rolls around and BOOM - new teachers! New expectations! Crap! After I just mastered writing the way my professor wanted. Now I have this new teacher, and I can't figure out what he wants, and when I sit down to write everything that I write just sounds like garbage. I know I'm not a bad writer, I just can't seem to write to this audience." That is when I say, "Well, then...forget about your audience."

Which is generally followed by a long pause and blank stare.

FORGET ABOUT YOUR AUDIENCE? Really? Isn't that a rather bold move?

At first, I thought that it was, and I worried that my first year writing professor might have somehow sensed me saying this and had a mild stroke. But then I came across a very famous article by Peter Elbow, and if you don't know who he is...FIND OUT...he is all sorts of amazing, and I have a mild crush on him. The article is titled "Closing My Eyes as I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience."

In this article Elbow suggests that "When we realize that an audience is somehow confusing or inhibiting us, the solution is fairly obvious. We can ignore that audience altogether during the stages of writing and direct our words only to ourselves or to no one in particular--or even to the 'wrong' audience...This strategy often dissipates the confusion" (52.)

Although the writing that you produce, while ignoring your audience, may seem sloppy or not professor acceptable, remember that this is just a rough draft. The important part of this exercise is that it enables you to start writing!

I once had a professor that told me that I could never ever ever start a sentence with the word "So." So (take that!) it was all that I could think about while writing the paper. I worked so hard to write a paper without using "so" at all, that when it was done, it just didn't sound like me, and it also was a terrible paper. My heart wasn't in it, and the important message that I was trying to convey was lost in the disjointed "I'm trying to please my professor" style of writing.

That is when I decided that I should just forget about this professor and just write my paper. When I started writing with no one in mind, just writing to get what I wanted to say on the paper, everything went so much smoother.

I am a firm believer in the fact that audience is very important, but if you are struggling writing for that audience, I suggest that you take Elbow's advice and forget about it.

Once you get the writing done, you can go back and tweak your paper for your intended audience. Change some words if you have to or revise what you had written. Delete all those sentences that started with "So" and so on and so forth. Adjusting your voice, yourself, your ethos can be very hard to do, but it is not impossible. If you find you are struggling writing those start of the semester "getting comfortable" papers, just get self-centered and think of you. There is time to revise those written words, so become self-focused and write that bad boy ...  forget about that audience of blue hairs out there. Instead play to an audience of none.

Interested in reading Peter Elbow's totally rad article? See below for the citation.

Elbow, Peter. "Closing My Eyes as I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience." 49.1 (1987) : 50-69. Print.