The art of exclamation marks!

This is a short book, but it carries a punch, as does its subject, the exclamation mark – or shriek, or bang, as it is occasionally and graphically called. I use the word ‘graphically’ advisedly, for the punctuation mark falls into an ambiguous territory overlapping orthography and illustration. I say to myself that I don’t like it, but I do on occasion. I recently used it to describe the noise of my horrible doorbell (‘BZZZT!’) to convey the sensation of panic that occurs when I hear it. I also love it when the speech bubble above a cartoon character’s head contains nothing but an exclamation mark: pure surprise. My favourite example is in Snoopy’s case, for often his ears also stand up like exclamation marks themselves.

But we have not always known how to use it. According to Florence Hazrat, the author of An Admirable Point, it took us a while to get a handle on it – as if it knew what it was about all along and we were just slow to catch up with it. In the Folio edition of Hamlet, the lines ‘How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable/Seem to me all the uses of this world’ ends in a question mark rather than an exclamation mark, as do the next words: ‘Fie on’t’.

For centuries, though, grammarians have advised against using it too freely, considering it vulgar. Editors seem to have spent much time removing Jane Austen’s exclamation marks from her novels, although very little of her manuscript material survives to prove this beyond doubt. Politicians and propagandists have used it to grab their audience’s attention, which has also tarnished its reputation. It seems to be a mainly American thing.