Language & Grammar discussion

What writers have to say about exclamation points.

More quotes on Exclamation Marks

In the family of punctuation, where the full stop is daddy and the comma is mummy, and the semicolon quietly practises the piano with crossed hands, the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit brother who gets overexcited and breaks things and laughs too loudly. ~Lynne Truss

An excessive use of exclamation marks is a certain indication of an unpractised writer or of one who wants to add a spurious dash of sensation to something unsensational. ~H. W. Fowler

So far as good writing goes, the use of the exclamation mark is a sign of failure. It is the literary equivalent of a man holding up a card reading ‘laughter’ to a studio audience. ~Miles Kingston

Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have a knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.~Elmore Leonard

And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head. ~Terry Pratchett

They are especially prevalent among the young -- but nowhere near as prevalent as lowercase letters, which now start sentences and reduce the pronoun "I" to size (or to undersize, shall we say).

I have always used exclamation marks with no sense of guilt. On reading this piece, however, I began to feel worried, wondering if I was over-fond of this apparently stigmatized mark.

To test myself, I looked out three of my articles still on my computer. There, to my relief, I discovered only two such marks. Each of them belonged in pieces from other works that I had quoted. One of them was by Kipling ("You'll be a man my son!").

Kipling was actually quite a good writer. I have therefore decided not to feel guilty about the exclamation mark. I shall continue to use it, as I always did, whenever I feel like it!

Mind you, Ruth, the piece was very intersting!

Exclamations are like salt. Ditto adjectives and adverbs. A little bit for flavor, but too many spoil the dish. Even Kipling (not that I have much experience with Kipling).