Exclamations!!!!!

"Exclamation points are the most irritating of all. Look! they say, look at what I just said! How amazing is my thought! It is like being forced to watch someone else’s small child jumping up and down crazily in the center of the living room shouting to attract attention. If a sentence really has something of importance to say, something quite remarkable, it doesn’t need a mark to point it out. And if it is really, after all, a banal sentence needing more zing, the exclamation point simply emphasizes its banality!" 

— Lewis Thomas

 

One of my favorite writing pointers is, “Never use exclamation points unless absolutely necessary!!!!!!” Punctuation is the mortar that holds our words together, but the words are the bricks. You can still build something with bricks and no mortar, but mortar without bricks doesn’t make anything. The goal is to find words that are the exclamation marks.

Speaking of which, exclamation marks used in an email header is a red flag suggesting possible spam. The same is true for capital letters. I delete everything that is capitalized and exclaimed. Spammers take note: “CLAIM YOUR MILION DOLLARS TODAY!!!!” is lousy English. Try, “Claim your million dollars today” Don’t forget to spell check.