The Scourge of the Exclamation Point: Excerpt From My Book: A Friendly Guide to Writing and Ghostwriting

Cut out all the exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.
                                                                                    - - - F. Scott Fitzgerald

I’m not an expert on punctuation but I know the basics, thanks to my English teacher mother. (She also taught Latin but that’s another story.) While I believe in altering writing rules when it’s appropriate, I also believe you have to know the rules inside and out before you can bend them. When I was in the ballet, we had an hour and a half training class every morning where we stuck firmly to the rules of proper technique. We learned the traditional way of doing things and we perfected that in every class, but when we rehearsed a particular ballet, the choreographer might ask us to perform variations that were outside the normal technique to express an emotion and tell a story.

The late Robert B. Parker, prolific author of the Spencer and Jesse Stone series among others, used a simple period at the end of his sentences. He hardly ever modified his nouns. He wasn’t a fan of adverbs. He made a short sentence as descriptive as someone else might make a whole paragraph and he didn’t use exclamation points. He trusted his expertise and he trusted his readers to interpret the meaning of what he was saying by his striking and skillful descriptions. I stand in awe of his mastery of describing both things and states of mind with a simple ungarnished sentence.

We don't all express ourselves in the same way. We may see things differently and have different styles of writing, but we all use punctuation marks that are available in our tool boxes:

1.     Period .

2.     Question mark ?

3.     Exclamation point !

4.     Comma ,

5.     Semicolon ;

6.     Colon :

7.     Dash —

8.     Hyphen -

9.    Parentheses ( )

10.  Brackets { }

12.  Apostrophe "

14.  Ellipsis . . .

I’m not going to bore you with definitions here but I urge you to learn how to use punctuation correctly since a misplaced comma or semi-colon can alter the meaning of what you want to say. But I will take some time to talk about the dreaded exclamation point. (!) My pet peeve.

When someone hires me to edit their work, often there are exclamation points everywhere. I remove most of them and in many cases, all of them. There may be a appropriate place for the exclamation point in your writing, particularly in dialogue, but mostly, I see it as a scourge, an epidemic among amateur writers, a lazy habit that means you don’t trust your reader to understand what you’re saying or how you're saying it. Or maybe you can’t be bothered or take the time to find the right words to express yourself. If you think you need to keep using exclamations points to impart emotions in your text, you haven’t done your job.

Pearl of writing wisdom:

If you need an exclamation point to express feelings,

Your text is inadequate.

Capital letters, bold print, italics and parentheses are often misused. Have you ever gotten an email written in all caps? It feels like someone is screaming at you. I did that once and the recipient of my email didn't speak to me for a while. Don't scream at your readers. Trust yourself to find the right way to bring out the emotions without showing anyone how to interpret your words. If you can't get your meaning across without using inappropriate punctuation, especially the exclamation point, it's time to go back to the drawing board and start over.