The Exclamatory Exigency


"Im super excited. I got my extern site and cant wait for my first day!!! Yay!" This is one of the many jarring posts currently lurching on my Facebook wall, waiting to catapult me into a sense of rage, fury, and a serious belief that REM knew what they were talking about. The source for the "end of the world as we know it" that I see evident in the posts? Well it's not externships, that's for sure, but rather the blatant overuse of the punctuation now commonly littering the written works of everyone from highly emotional teenagers, to effervescent teachers, to mentally deranged college admission officers who just really want you to visit their campus! The exclamation point has slowly evolved from a sparingly used, but extraordinarily effective, punctuation mark to a desperate and pathetic attempt by a writer to call attention to their humor and wit, or merely to replace a puny lexicon.
To find the source of the current catastrophe, we must first go back in time to the initial use of the mark. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the mark is first seen in Latin, where the word for joy was "io" with the i appearing above the o. So the mark has long served to express joy and emotion, but the question is when the symbol started to replace the vivid verb as a means of conveying the emotion a reader should feel, and especially when many marks began to appear continuously, creating an amalgamation of overwhelming emotion. Great writers have had a vendetta with a reliance on exclamation points since the early 1900's, when one of the greatest American writers ever, Mark Twain, exclaimed- without the need of special punctuation- that writers who leaned too heavily on the mark were trying to call attention to their own humor, something the great Twain never needed a mark to call attention to. F. Scott Fitzgerald reiterated this stance when he said “Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke." Protest of the punctuation has come from other factions of writing also, even in the over-excitement driven sector of graphic comics. Stan Lee once attempted to ban the mark from all Marvel comic books, however his experiment failed when the printing did not pick up on periods, creating a confusing disarray of run-on sentences. So how, with all these great writers being avidly against the mark has its popularity grown at an exponential rate? One need not go farther than blame it on those kids these days and their modern technology.
The exclamation mark and texting were a match made in heaven; both are a means of communication created to expedite the process of communicating, and each can be used by any teenager with a phone. One connects people a world apart in seconds, and the other is able to convey the amount of emotion that would previously require copious amounts of time articulating a perfect sentence with a single piece of punctuation. Both of these innovations have their place in society. They are beneficial, when used properly, but both can be dangerous when overused or are used at an inappropriate time. It is there where we truly find the current problem with exclamation points, in the liberal, almost whorish, dispersal of the mark. With the written word being used even more frequently than before with the help of Twitter, Facebook, and email, users are complaining that a sentence cannot contain the joy and emphasis required without the help of an exclamatory point. But this belief is rooted not in a genuine interest in conveying an idea through written word. Rather it festers from an overall disinterest in, or inability to, articulate a sentence that through words entirely is charged with emotion so much, any ending punctuation other than a period is rendered useless. After all, authors have been able to instill in their readers the emotion they have felt without the need of an exclamation mark, not to mention multiple, solely with their diction for centuries before us!!! In fact, if an exclamation mark is used to express extreme joy, I sincerely doubt that anyone is capable of feeling the amount of joy that is required for two, three, four, or however many marks your low morals allow you to cram into your text. The amount of excitement in three points would, at the very least, only be described as orgasmic, and four would probably result in some sort of cardiac episode. So for your own sake, and the sake of others, let's save multiple exclamation marks for dire heart emergencies and really good sex.
While there is truth to the fact that exclamation marks provide an emphasis and emotion to a sentence, it is also necessary for writers to not rely on the mark as a substitute for effective prose. The sign can certainly serve to provide the extra Batman "Pow!" to the end of a sentence, but should only be used after the sentence is expertly written with enough raw verb power to defeat Ra's Al-Ghul himself before any punctuation is added.