In Defence of Exclamation Marks (!)
Over the last two months, most people in my vicinity have had prescience of this much-heralded blog. I’ve been allegedly writing it for weeks but keep grinding to a halt after the first few paragraphs because I have too much to say! In the wake of my Instagram post about exclamation marks, I’ve been thinking more than ever about these little pops of punctuation.
I read Florence Hazrat’s brilliant book, took notes, leapt down rabbit holes and have come out the other side with a brain crammed full of so many exclamation mark facts that I inadvertently crushed my ability to write about them under the enormous pressure to Get it All Down, and!, importantly, Get it All Right. It’s the internet, after all – if you don’t cover every possible base with perfect accuracy (something that’s both normal to want and possible to achieve), then you may as well go jump in a lake.
But I’m still fizzing with the desire to talk to people about these wonderful marks, so I’m going to put aside my reticence and just write. Forgive my errors and permit me to err on the side of exuberance, as it’s the only way this is getting down.
One of the first points of note about exclamation marks is just how old they are. Readers familiar with the Tiffany Effect will understand when I say that they seem too modern to bear, let alone infest the writing of 14th-century poets. For those unfamiliar, the Tiffany Effect is a phenomenon by which correct, historically accurate details are perceived by audiences to be modern anachronisms. The name Tiffany is one such case: it’s existed in English since the 1600s, yet – no matter how accurate – if a Tiffany showed up in a book about the Jacobites, you’d get the unsettling feeling she was bringing a Starbucks frappé with her.
Things that are so old shouldn’t feel as exciting as exclamation marks do, but it’s possible their age has resulted in their power. Exclamation marks physically (electrically, in the brain) change the way we read and how we feel about what we’re reading.
“Exclamation marks physically (electrically, in the brain) change the way we read and how we feel about what we’re reading.”
So often and for so many years, they’ve been associated with such danger, urgency and excitement that our brains appear to work physically quicker when they spot one. If a full stop is a crouching tiger, it turns out that adding the LEAP! of an upward stroke sends us into a mini fight or flight response. Wicked people can weaponise this to make us buy and do things we don’t need or want to, but it’s also worth considering if you’re less Hitlerian (!!!). Attenborough, for example, speaks with exclamations, but he rarely writes with them. Perhaps he should make like the tiger and pounce every now and then?
So, they are dreadfully old and powerfully evocative, but what is it that exclamation marks evoke? Although they’re part of what we could call the nuclear family of punctuation, where the comma and the full stop are Mummy and Daddy, the colon, semicolon and ellipses are the stern older siblings, and the apostrophes and quotation marks are the constantly confused identical twins, the exclamation mark and its sibling the question mark are undeniably the emotional oddballs of the group.
This is because while the purpose of most punctuation is syntactic – guiding us through the sentence like street signs, manners or whatever metaphor suits you best – exclamation and question marks deal primarily with tone. Of course, they are also terminal marks, and they contain the other mark used to end sentences (the full stop) in their design, but I would argue that their role as terminal punctuation is almost negligible. In fact, if I had my way, both question and exclamation marks would have a comma alternative, allowing us to sprinkle them throughout sentences where required. You’ll notice that I get around this lack of formal mark by simply popping in an exclamation or question mark before the requisite comma, but it would be much neater if it were bundled into one. (Florence disagrees, but this is our only point of contention in an otherwise highly agreeable reading experience.)
If their purpose isn’t purely (or even necessarily) syntactic, then what are they for? The question mark, as used in the preceding sentence, is easy because it tells us to alter the tone of the sentence into an interrogative one. Our eyes scan the line of the sentence and spy the question mark, and our internal voice changes its pitch to an upward lilt. We understand that the sentence asks a question, and we know by its content and context whether the question demands an answer. Question marks enable us to curate a questioning tone.
Easy, then! It follows that an exclamation mark must, therefore, enable us to craft a tone of exclamation, which is all very well until we consider the sheer magnitude of exclamatory and questioning tones we have in our arsenal. While questions can reasonably fit into two camps, rhetorical or literal, we can ask questions – and exclaim things – in an infinite variety of tones. Curious, scornful, friendly, alarmed, aroused, combative: all of these tones can apply to both questions or exclamations. And yet, it’s not the role of the punctuation itself to tell us what that tone should be. Instead, it trusts that we understand the tone of the sentence and goes about its job of modifying it.
“It’s not the role of the punctuation itself to tell us what that tone should be. Instead, it trusts that we understand the tone of the sentence and goes about its job of modifying it.”
The question mark modifies a sentence’s tone by making the statement inquisitorial. Exclamation marks make the tone more so. More excited, more scornful, more alarmed, more despairing, more wildly horny (we’ve all seen those pre-roll ads). And it’s astounding how well they do their jobs.
The modern use of a single exclamation mark or series of them shows just how they work. When someone texts you that they’re engaged, you may reply !!. Those marks mean something different when another friend texts you that their house burned down, and you reply the same !!. Exclamation marks rely on a mutual understanding of the tone they are emphasising, and we almost always seem to get it right. It’s remarkable.
That’s the reason too many exclamation marks can feel shouty. Used in excess, they tell our brains that someone is turning their affect up to 11, cupping your face in their feverish paws and bellowing at you. But it’s also why they can make things feel friendlier. In an email, they add a (slightly frenetic) corporate grin to your communication, which is far preferable to most people than the comparatively icy full stop. It’s certainly the general preference of women, who are more likely to go out of their way to foster atmospheres of friendliness in all spaces, including across digital and other word-based media. It’s our desire to reassure people and engender cordiality that has given the exclamation mark its unfair reputation as a feminine mark. A 2006 study of online communication platforms found that once exclamation marks of ‘friendliness’ were removed from the data, men and women used them at roughly the same rate for emphasising the tone of their writing.
It’s nonsense (and often sexist) to say that if you write well enough, you shouldn’t ‘need’ exclamation marks. The idea of them being a bad writing habit probably needs its own post, but I’ll finish with this: Elmore Leonard, one of the most famous anti-exclamation-mark advocates, claimed you shouldn’t use more than two or three per 100,000 words. This bonkers decree is made all the more laughable by the fact that data from his own books shows he used them 16 times more than his own recommendation.
When the Greeks first started writing, there weren’t any spaces between the words – it was just one long line of text. To be a skilful orator in those days meant quickly parsing where words began and ended, but I hardly think anyone is smugly declaring that the spaces we now include between words are a crutch. The same applies to exclamation marks.
The exclamation mark wouldn’t have lasted this long as a piece of punctuation if it hadn’t been useful to us. It was likely invented by one Italian man, picked up again and refined a few hundred years later by another. Thanks to early printing presses adopting it as a standard mark, we are fortunate to have it in our writing toolbox now. And I, for one, am glad. (!!)
