Stefanie C Peters

This little punctuation mark may appear harmless, but symptoms accompanying its use may include maudlin, overexcited, breathy prose and could lead to a loss of your reader’s attention.

In college, one of my creative writing professors instructed that a writer is allowed a total of three exclamation points in her life—under that logic, I was too young to risk using one yet. Better to wait until I had a few more years to master my craft and learn when such a powerful spice in the soup of punctuation might be necessary. The practice deleting any exclamation point that snuck its way onto my manuscripts was drilled into my head. (How did they keep managing to appear there?)

Now I find that my pen itches to cross out these devilish little marks any time I see them: for example, when I worked at a literary agency, slush with an exclamation point on its first page was usually sent to the ‘no’ pile almost automatically. I took it as a sign of further excessive punctuation and prose style to follow.

I am not alone in my aversion to exclamation points. Here is F. Scott Fitzgerald:

“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”

And Terry Pratchett:

“Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.”

So how did these apparently so terrible marks begin? Exclamation points were first used in English in the fifteenth century, probably soon after William Caxton brought the printing press to England in 1476. It was originally called the “note of admiration,” using the Latin sense of admiration to mean wonder, which is why when Ferdinand first sees Miranda in The Tempest, he says: “O, you wonder!” (with an exclamation point).

One romantic theory of the origin of the mark itself is that it was originally the Latin word for joy, Io, printed in abbreviated form with the I above the o. It was in wide enough use by the beginning of the seventeenth century for Shakespeare to create a pun about it in The Winter’s Tale:

First Gentlemen: “I make a broken delivery of the business, but the changes I perceived in the King and Camillo were very notes of admiration. They seemed almost, with staring on one another, to tear the cases of their eyes.”

However, the exclamation point was not part of a standard typewriter keyboard until the 1970s, which makes me consider whether the overuse of it is a product of the past forty years. Could it be tied to the rise of the computer and the Internet? Before it became a standard keyboard feature, a writer would have to make an effort to include one in her manuscript. Certainly email and text language that commonly uses multiple exclamation points together (“How R U!!!”) may lead writers toward a tendency to overuse them in prose as well.

But there are still those who have a stronger constitution for exclamation points, such as Ariane Sherine, writing for the Guardian. Her argument is that exclamation points are innocuous next to emoticons and text-speech. If I have to pick between prose with too many exclamation points and prose that forgets how to spell out words (of which I have seen a few too many), I’ll pick the former, thanks.