I recently got a new follower on my Twitter page - PollyFrost. I wasn't sure who she was, but a bit of digging revealed that Polly Frost is a playwright and writer who has written for the Atlantic and the New Yorker. She has also written for the Barnes & Noble Book Review, it seems. For them, she's written a very funny piece about the overuse of exclamation points!
Reading her article, punctuated throughout with incessant exclamation points, reminded me of a quote I'd read some time ago on the limits of these dangerous punctuation marks. Again, thanks to Polly Frost, the quote came from William Maxwell, fiction editor for the New Yorker. His claim was that every writer gets only two exclamation points -- per career. This was, of course, before the age of the internet, with every other person and their mothers on Facebook, Twitter, and e-mail.
Regardless, the message stuck with me. A quick look across my pages and previous posts shows that I clearly have not followed the rule. But it does make you think about the placement of every exclamation point. If you could have only one, would it really be worth it?
Reading a book on the Tuskegee Airmen that is punctuated with remarks like "He crashed and was taken POW by the Germans almost immediately!" or "The pilot's left wing caught fire, resulting in an emergency landing on enemy territory!" or "Eisenhower went up for a secret fly-over in Germany!" just... doesn't do it for me. (Note: those aren't real quotations, I made them up. But I did recently read an aviation history book with a bit too many exclamations!)
My general rule-of-thumb is to stick to one ! per piece (be it email, Facebook status, blog post) and even less when writing more formally (press releases, essays, the like). And I tend to mistrust any writer that overdoes it on the exclamation points.
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