!!! – confessions of an exclamation mark apologist
Difficult as it may be to imagine, your author was once a young man. Amongst his many, many pretentions and affectations (the studiously manufactured scruffiness, the fauxhemian sensibilities, the preposterously snooty opinions about any music other people had actually heard) was his righteous disdain for the exclamation mark. I was a gangling, pseudo-indie man-toddler who’d sooner gnaw off my own fingers than sully my ‘art’ with this coarse and vulgar blotch. (As such, what I wrote often read like Michael Owen telling a particularly uninteresting story about hamstring injuries).
Nowadays, hardened by the demands of a decade’s copywriting, I take a more libertarian approach to punctuation. After so long in copywriting you learn, quite definitively, that there is no grammatical aberration you will not stoop to in order to win a client’s approval.
Also, on reflection, a blanket ban on exclamation marks is a little like jabbing a hole in one’s own canoe. In marketing, an exclamation mark is often a valid inclusion. Sometimes, it is an entirely necessary one.
And yet, copywriting’s old foe – the English language curriculum – has taken the strange and faintly Soviet decision to outlaw the exclamation mark.
Perhaps that is a little dramatic. Few 7 year olds will be carted off to the grammatical gulags for their indiscretions. But still, the Department of Education have decreed (and it’s not often a modern institution actually ‘decrees’ anymore) that the Key Stage 1 & 2 Curriculum will no longer award marks for the ‘incorrect usage’ of exclamation marks.
Oddly, what they define as the incorrect usage of the mark is anything other than sentences that begin with ‘How’ or ‘What’. So, if one were to be utterly childish about it, the phrase ‘I’m going to kill you with a table leg’ is less deserving of exclamation than ‘What a lovely collection of carpet samples!’
This is, as I said, a churlish observation. It is admirable that schools are teaching young children to be more discerning in their use of the exclamation mark. If they proposed to reward students based on the sheer volume of exclamation marks they could pack into each sentence there would be riots – or at least some significant tutting.
And yet, not untypically for the Department of Education, a good intention arrives with the distinct whiff of ham-fistery.
In our profession, the regulation of exclamation marks is also important. Broadly speaking, a bold and forceful headline would not become any more compelling with the addition of an exclamation. Likewise, an attempt at a humorous headline is instantly undermined by the inclusion of an exclamation mark.
In fact, the occasions which demand an exclamation mark in copywriting are hardly regular. But it is recognising when the exclamation mark enhances our copy, when it performs a genuine act of exclamation, that copywriters must learn.
The same, surely, is true of school children. Rather than signposting the neat but deeply flawed boundaries of the exclamation mark’s role, should we not be equipping them with the imagination and instinct to know when and where the mark can make an impact?
Perhaps these young scamps should follow the example set by their older, sort-of-wiser copywriting forebears. If there’s a rule you don’t like the look of, just ignore it. Exclamation mark.