Exclamation Points Cause Cancer

Exclamation points are the MSG of writing. Put in as flavor enhancers for emphasis.  They are almost always unnecessary if you are using the right ingredients and tools to start with.

Exclamation points are fingers of accusation at the writer. You don’t trust your voice, plot, characters, and description, to convey emotion. You don’t trust your reader to be smart enough to get it. You are lazy! You are guilty of telling and not showing. Unless you are trying to be funny or using exclamation points in dialogue, I don’t want to read anything like this:

O how happy we were! or We were in danger! I began to tremble and sweat! I screamed! He was the ugliest King Charles Spaniel ever! Granddaddy should have loved me! Instead, he betrayed me and sold the dog to buy whiskey!

No. Just. No.

Even worse is the practice of multiple exclamation points crowded together at the end of a sentence like a chorus line of expert witnesses.

I knew we would be together forever!!!!!!

Pffffffoooey.

That one sentence left a sour aftertaste.

Returning to some of the examples above, if you’ve written, O how happy we were! ask yourself (because the reader will) how happy were you? Show the reader what happy looks like. We were so happy we found ourselves giggling for no reason. We were so happy we started a Facebook page for planning our wedding. We were so happy Mike stopped biting his nails and I forgot to be embarrassed by my big ears.

If you’ve written, He was the ugliest King Charles Spaniel ever!; you don’t need an exclamation point. You need a period and then elaboration. ….ever. His under bite made him look like he was chewing his own nose and his ears looked like dirty bath mats. Instead of the soulful eyes typical of the breed, this dog viewed the world with a suspicious squint.

As for Granddaddy selling the dog for booze, the fact that he is the speaker’s grandfather implies he should love the speaker. Instead, he betrayed me and sold the dog to buy whiskey!  The action recorded and the word “betrayal” evoke the desired emotion from the reader. The exclamation point sabotages the drama and pushes it into melodrama. Is that what you want to do?  By the way, if you write, I screamed! an exclamation point is superfluous. A scream is understood to be an exclamation by its nature. It doesn’t need a red bow of punctuation.

If you habitually use more than three exclamation points per double spaced page, please cut back. They’re artificial. They’re not good for you. They’ve been known to trigger migraines. And they leave the reader hungry for what’s fresh and real.