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

This is a short one. It’s important but it doesn’t require much interpretation.

I’m pretty good at using punctuation properly thanks to my English teacher mother. While I believe in altering writing rules when it’s appropriate, (she didn’t), I also believe you have to know the rules inside and out before you can bend them.

It’s a good idea to keep this in mind when you’re using punctuation. The late Robert B. Parker, prolific author of the Spencer and Jesse Stone series, adapted for TV, used a simple period at the end of his sentences. He said. Or she said. Not, he said gently Or, she said loudly. He didn’t modify his nouns. He didn’t feel the need to. He wasn’t a fan of adverbs and he didn’t use exclamation points. He was famous for his economy of words, he wrote with great clarity, so he didn’t need punctuation to explain what he meant. He trusted his readers to interpret the meaning of what he was saying by his striking and skillful descriptions.

We don't all have that skill so we can turn to the fourteen types of punctuation marks that are available in our tool boxes:

1. Period

2. Question mark

3. Exclamation mark

4. Comma

5. Semicolon

6. Colon

7. Dash

8. Hyphen

9. Parentheses

10. Brackets

11. Braces

12. Apostrophe

13. Question Mark

14. Ellipsis

I’m not going to bore you with definitions here. I urge you to learn how to use punctuation correctly since a misplaced comma or semi-colon can alter the meaning of your sentence. But I will take some time to talk about the dreaded exclamation point. (!) My pet peeve. I know that I’m opinionated about this and I know that some writers won’t agree with me, but since this is my book, I’ll tell you how I feel about it.

When I see three exclamation marks in a row, I cringe. There may be a place for the exclamation point in your writing but mostly, I see it as a scourge, an epidemic among amateur writers, a lazy habit that means you don’t trust your readers to understand what you’re saying or how you're saying it. I think that if you need to keep using exclamations points to impart emotions in your text, to express feelings, your text is inadequate.

Capital letters, bold print, italics and parentheses are often as misused as the explanation point. When someone indicates quotation marks by putting their fingers in the air and wiggling them, I get annoyed. 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 them to feel the emotions without showing them how to interpret your words. If you can't get your meaning across without using inappropriate punctuation, it's time to go back to the drawing board, think it through and start over.