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Anybody who has ever logged on knows that online writing begets exclamation points. A lot of exclamation points!
-- Ben Yagoda at The New York Times
Is that true? For myself, even before I heard of the Internet, I always liked using what punctuation marks I could get my hands on and using them freely and exuberantly and without apology. What's the point of getting the big box of 64 crayons if you are not going to use all the colors?
In any case, we are given a fancy theory for this supposed punctuation craze:
David Shipley, the executive editor of Bloomberg View and a former Op-Ed editor at this newspaper, and Will Schwalbe, authors of “Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better,” speculate that the trend stems in part from the nature of online media. “Because email is without affect, it has a dulling quality that almost necessitates kicking everything up a notch just to bring it to where it would normally be,” they write. But what if a particular point needs to be stressed beyond where it would normally be? Well, you need to kick it up an additional notch, with another exclamation point, or three. The unsurprising result has been Weimar-level exclamation inflation, where (it sometimes seems) you have to raise your voice to a scream merely to be heard, and a sentence without blingy punctuation comes across like a whisper.
And sometimes one just wants to have fun, with the challenge being not to sacrifice clarity for your grammatical zeal. If this has shown up more in Internet use, it may be because people felt like they were not bound by their English teachers and bosses when zipping off fun e-messages to friends and co-workers, and one could feel like a teenager again - wild and crazy with no thought for the morrow.
-- Ben Yagoda at The New York Times
Is that true? For myself, even before I heard of the Internet, I always liked using what punctuation marks I could get my hands on and using them freely and exuberantly and without apology. What's the point of getting the big box of 64 crayons if you are not going to use all the colors?
In any case, we are given a fancy theory for this supposed punctuation craze:
David Shipley, the executive editor of Bloomberg View and a former Op-Ed editor at this newspaper, and Will Schwalbe, authors of “Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better,” speculate that the trend stems in part from the nature of online media. “Because email is without affect, it has a dulling quality that almost necessitates kicking everything up a notch just to bring it to where it would normally be,” they write. But what if a particular point needs to be stressed beyond where it would normally be? Well, you need to kick it up an additional notch, with another exclamation point, or three. The unsurprising result has been Weimar-level exclamation inflation, where (it sometimes seems) you have to raise your voice to a scream merely to be heard, and a sentence without blingy punctuation comes across like a whisper.
And sometimes one just wants to have fun, with the challenge being not to sacrifice clarity for your grammatical zeal. If this has shown up more in Internet use, it may be because people felt like they were not bound by their English teachers and bosses when zipping off fun e-messages to friends and co-workers, and one could feel like a teenager again - wild and crazy with no thought for the morrow.
