Exclamation Points!!!

Exclamation points are the most irritating of all.  Look! They say, look at what I just said!  How amazing is my thought! It is like being forced to watch someone else’s small child jumping up and down crazily in the center of the living room shouting to attract attention.  If a sentence really has something of importance to say, something quite remarkable, it doesn’t need a mark to point it out.

– Lewis Thomas, “Notes on Punctuation”

 

We must remember that writing projects tone: if we sound too excited or emotional in our writing, our audience may be unlikely to see us as reasonable or credible.  Exclamation points project both excitement and emotion—often unnecessarily, as Lewis Thomas points out:  “If a sentence really has something of importance to say, something quite remarkable, it doesn’t need a mark to point it out.”

Exclamation points are perhaps most frequently used with interjections, words or phrases that exclaim, protest, or command:

Hey!

Look out!

Get off of my foot!

Interjections are usually too informal for academic writing, and exclamation points in general make us seem excitable.  Use exclamation points very sparingly in academic writing.

Resources

Schoolhouse Rock explains interjections well.

Capital Community College has a good explanation of how to use exclamation points—if you do decide to use them.

I highly recommend the Lewis Thomas article “Notes on Punctuation.”  It can be found as a web document on John Lawler’s personal page from the University of Michigan or as a PDF document on Dr. Judith Newman’s Lupinworks.