I associate them with my father.
In any postcard he sent, from Cornwall or France or Corsica, there were guaranteed to be four or five.
Rain! Pétanque! Cheese!
If a holiday was going really well, one might end every single blue felt tip sentence.
And sometimes, if a meal or sunset had been particularly great, there would be three in a row!!!
Perhaps this is why I’ve generally reacted against using them.
This is fairly extreme.
I have a joke, now an old joke, that I allow myself one exclamation mark a year on social media.
The last time I used one was April 25th. When Dead Boy Detectives aired.
Obviously, using my one ! so early in the year means I’m not expecting anything as exciting to happen.
I also have a private rule, however — and that is only to allow myself one exclamation mark per novel.
(They are also — research for this entry tells me — called screamers, slammers and bangs. And have been referred to, by Megan Garber in an Atlantic article, as ‘the cockroach of the punctuation world’.)
Clearly, if I were writing a first person narration, and the narrator had the same zest for life and enjoyment of cheese as my father, I would use lots of cockroaches.
Perhaps even multiple ones.
I would also emphasise words by underlining them (which Substack won’t allow me to do) or putting them in italics or bold or bold italics or ALL CAPS. My text would become what I think of as f u n k y.
But generally, I think that the same rule holds for exclamation marks as for speech tags in dialogue.
In fact, they do very much the same work.
‘I really hate you,’ she shouted.
matches —
‘I really hate you!’
But the latter is more ambiguous, because she could equally have screamed. And a shout is completely different to a scream.
Need I say that —
‘I really hate you!’ she shouted.
is overdoing it.
Where an exclamation mark might come in handy, with dialogue, is if the word choices give no indication of shock or surprise.
‘But that’s a Wednesday!’
Again, this seems flatter, less distinguished, than —
‘But that’s a Wednesday,’ she spluttered.
This is where emojis start to outnuance conventional punctuation marks. This is why emojis came into being.
But emojis are far more intrusive, on any page, than an exclamation mark — and they are far more likely to date embarrassingly.
;)
The rule I mentioned, which holds for exclamation marks and speech tags, is —
If you can avoid using them, do.
That is, if you can find another way of doing the same work of communication, but less directly, then you are probably writing more subtly.
When the reader knows that you’re pointing out everything to them, they start to become lazy.
They clock the ! and assume something vaguely shouty has been said, but won’t pay attention to the detail of that perhaps highly articulate dismay or rage or terror.
I don’t think of exclamation marks as cockroaches. Cockroaches are alive and move around all the time. Cockroaches, as Megan Garber wanted to emphasize, proliferate.
An exclamation mark is like a nail in the page.
It pins something down, so it absolutely can’t move, and that means the fabric around it is likely to tear slightly.
As a last word, I will say this.
If an agent or publisher starts reading a submission! And what they mainly see! is shoutiness! and even screaminess!! They’re going to reject it straight off!!! If the punctutation is this unsubtle, what hope do the characters have?!?
They’re not hearing a clear storytelling voice, they’re hearing someone nailing something down — hard.
They’re hearing the story scream.
I tell my students that if they use one exclamation mark, they have probably use two too many.