When I decided to rename this blog Andy writes! to signify its new direction, I’m sure a few readers cringed at the sight of an exclamation point in the title.
I understand. For writers, the exclamation point (hereinafter referred to as “!”) is perhaps the most maligned and most offensive of all punctuation marks. In his book Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, Benjamin Dreyer calls the ! “bossy, hectoring, and, ultimately, wearying.” In her Grammar Girl Style Guide, Mignon Fogarty, without passing judgment, advises, “Don’t overuse them.” The late Elmore Leonard, a prolific and best-selling crime novelist, laid down the law on the ! in his 10 rules for writing: “You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.”
Some writers may think the ! turns your prose into a party, spices things up a bit, adds a shouty razzle dazzle to an otherwise mundane statement of fact. (Oatmeal for breakfast today! It was good!!!) But a lot of us see the ! as font snobs view comic sans. The ! is the comic sans of the punctuation world, a clownish affront to all who take their writing and reading seriously.
At least that’s what we’ve been led to believe. Throughout my career, from my reporter days in journalism, where any appearance of bias or hyperbole is to be avoided, until my final days in the marketing and branding realm, where the ! is more welcomed and, I think, overused, I’ve tried to use the ! sparingly. I’ve followed the Associated Press dictum to employ it only to “express a high degree of surprise, incredulity or other strong emotion.”
There are times when the ! is appropriate and necessary. Dreyer writes that “it would be irresponsible not to properly convey with an exclamation mark the excitement of such as ‘Your hair is on fire!’ The person with the burning head might otherwise not believe you. And the likes of ‘What a lovely day!’ with a period rather than a bang, as some people like to call the exclamation point, might seem sarcastic. Or depressed.”
The ! also pairs well with certain interjections (hey! ouch! hurrah!). This I learned not from some stodgy style guide but from the Grammar Rock programming that interrupted my Saturday morning cartoon viewing as a kid. (I also learned as a kid, from the Batman TV series of the early ’60s, that the ! should follow cartoonish, all-caps representations of the sound effects emanating from fistfights: KAPOW! CRACK! ZOK!.)
Why the !? <- (this is not an interrobang)
So what possessed me to add the ! to the title of this website? As I mentioned in the opening salvo of this repurposed blog, the ! is intended to differentiate this one from another website that carries the “Andy writes” name (sans the !) as well as convey a sense of exhilaration and anticipation. “When you see that ! in the title,” I wrote, “you know something good is in store, and you can’t wait to find out what it is.”
It gives the title a little pizzazz, right?
In our social media-saturated world, there’s no getting away from the !. Even the most buttoned-up professional in real life will toss an ! here and there in a LinkedIn post (We’re hiring! Join our team! Just wrapped up an AMAZING staff meeting!!!) or whenever they encounter a cat video on Instagram (cuteness overload!!!).
Beyond social media, the ! has made inroads in the world of politics and branding. Remember when Jeb Bush last ran for president? His campaign thought it would infuse his campaign with some excitement by adding an ! to the logo.
The logo aligned with the candidate’s “optimistic” campaign for the presidency. It was also supposed to convey fun and youthful vigor and detract from the fact that, if elected, Jeb would be the third Bush in the White House.
But neither the candidacy nor the logo worked out so well. The whole Jeb! slogan gave the campaign the feel of “a sitcom or a Broadway musical.” WIRED proclaimed in a headline that the typography was Worse Than a Piece of Crap. And didn’t even use an ! to drive home that point.
A newer mark, here to stay
As punctuation marks go, the ! is a relatively recent arrival, as I learned from reading An Admirable Point: A Brief History of the Exclamation Mark! (yes, the ! is part of the subtitle), by Florence Hazrat. The comma, colon and period were well-established by the time the ! came around in the mid-1300s. Hazrat writes that the ! was invented in 1340 by Italian scholar and poet Iacopo Alpoleio da Urbisaglia, later refined by Florentine lawyer and politician Coluccio Salutati in 1399, and embraced by printers as the dominion of wordsmithing moved from the clergy into law, commerce and education.
Social media and the world of marketing has embraced the ! with open arms. Beyond the failure of Jeb!, artists, brands and Broadway shows have made the mark more commonplace.
“[W]hile singer P!nk exploded the power of ! in mid-name, Yahoo!, Jeopardy!, Moulin Rouge! and Mamma Mia! jump off the exclamation mark springboard,” Hazrat writes in the introduction of her book.
Hazrat writes that her book “sets out to reclaim the exclamation mark from its much maligned and misunderstood place at the bottom of the punctuation hierarchy,” a point she reinforces in a Washington Post essay last March. “What I love about ! is precisely the unabashed emotion that makes sober style guides uncomfortable. The exclamation point encodes feelings — and it doesn’t apologize for doing so.”
Maybe we shouldn’t apologize for using the !, either. Maybe it’s time to come to terms with the !, for the excited little thing isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
As for me and my writing, I plan to continue to use exclamation points only sparingly.
Perhaps Winston Churchill’s advice about our choice of words for writing — “Short words are best and old words when short are best of all” — should apply to punctuation.
Let the older, more familiar marks — the comma, colon, period — carry your narrative, but save the ! for special occasions. Just as too much spice can ruin an otherwise delicious meal, so too can an overuse of the !.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Andy writes! 
This is a great blog post!!!!! Cool to learn that the exclamation point has been emoting at the end of sentences since 1340.
The ! sort of lives in the same space as the semicolon but despised by different spectrums of people. I say, use language and punctuation, it’s fine. People tend to want to create rules around what types of words or punctuation to us. Of course, almost everything is best in moderation.