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Saturday, January 03, 2015

How I stopped worrying and learned to love the exclamation mark

How I stopped worrying and learned to love the exclamation mark: "My initial resistance to the exclamation mark was down to an intense dislike of their use in journalism. An exclamation mark should only be employed within quotes, and only then when the journalist is sure it was uttered.
Otherwise, seeing an article end in an exclamation mark suggests that the writer has been unable to get the message across adequately in the many words that preceded it. It is, as F Scott Fitzgerald once said, “like laughing at your own joke”.
So, when the moment came to use that exclamation mark in a text, thumb hovering over the key, it felt like a slipping of standards, a crumbling of resistance. It was the breaking of the dam.
Since which, I have learned to love the exclamation mark, to accept it as another shift in the evolution of written communication, allowable in texts, mails, Twitter – but still not journalism. Never in journalism.
But the mass deployment of the exclamation mark in personal communication has fuelled a shift in punctuation, an upward inflection of sorts, one of the new work-arounds that attempts to convey in written communication what would be clear if it were spoken."



'via Blog this'

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