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When enough is enough!
Terry Pratchett, reknowned author of the discworld series, once said, ‘Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign of a diseased mind!’
I’m not sure about that, but I do know that over-using exclamation marks is easily done. I know, because it’s definitely one of my weaknesses!!!!!!!
Dictionary.com’s definition describes the exclamation mark as being — ‘The punctuation mark ! used after exclamations and vehement commands.’
It’s so easy to rely on the exclamation mark to highlight emotion, action or similar when we should be looking at improving our descriptions of the situation.
In social media, especially the different forms of ‘chats’, multiple exclamation marks are commonly used to emphasise a comment or statement in a message that tries to be short and succint. Unfortunately this trend has been easy to carry through to other writing.
Multiple exclamation marks do not increase the emphasis of a sentence or paragraph — just the one will suffice.
We also need to remember that there is no place in academic writing for the exclamation mark and the same applies to business oriented articles. Remember that if you are writing for these type of publications that there are certain rules that you need to conform to and disregarding these will affect whether your articles are accepted.
