On the exclamation point

The New York Times has a fluffy piece reflecting on the use of the exclamation point in modern communications (email and texts, seemingly).

Anecdotally (and how else could you justify a story like this?), the article's writer, Aimee Lee Ball, claims that the exclamation point has found its way into email and texts in spite of the reservations of "literate and articulate people." Its purpose is to express emotion, she claims, and cites a book to prover her point.

In their book “Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better,” David Shipley and Will Schwalbe say that the exclamation point was originally reserved for an actual exclamation (“My goodness!” or “Good grief!”) but that they have become unexpected champions of this maligned punctuation. “We call it the ur emoticon,” Mr. Schwalbe said in a recent phone conversation. “In an idealized world, we would all be able to do what our English teachers told us to do, which is to write beautiful prose where enthusiasm is conveyed by word choice and grammar.”

“E-mail has such a flattening effect: it’s toneless and affectless,” he said. “The exclamation point is the quickest and easiest way to kick things up a notch, but not if you’re angry. Only happy exclamation points.”

Email is toneless and affectless? Really?

I've heard this argument before, or at least I think I have. "It's so cold." "You can't convey emotion." "Subtlety is lost." Etc., etc., etc.

Bullshit.

Email is expressed using the same alphanumeric characters and punctuation as newspapers and books. The protestations of typesetting geeks (sorry, but you know that's what you are) aside, the content and interpretation of a piece of writing does not depend on the medium in which it is read. The writing is what it is, and it stands or falls on its own merits.

An email message is not toneless and affectless because it's email. It's toneless and affectless because of who wrote it.

Classic style manuals generally decree that exclamation points be used sparingly. “But e-mails seemed from the start to require different punctuation,” said Lynne Truss, the author of “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.” “As if by common consent, people turned to the ellipsis and the exclamation point. There must have been a reason for this. My theory is that both of these marks are ways of trying to keep the attention of the reader. One of them says, ‘Don’t go away, I haven’t finished, don’t go, don’t go,’ while the other says, ‘Listen! I’m talking to you!’ ”

“Since the advent of e-mail, I have personally started all my messages with a yell,” she said. “Instead of ‘Dear George,’ I write, ‘George!’ My belief is that when we read a printed page, we engage an inner ear, which follows the sense, the voice and the music in a linear way. We sort of listen to the writer. Whereas on a computer screen, we tend to pick out bits of information and link them for ourselves. The exclamation point is a natural reaction to this: Writers are shouting to be heard.”

"We engage an inner ear, which follows the sense, the voice and the music in a linear way." I cannot believe how tortured this reasoning is. Truss is contorting herself into a knot to distinguish email from other forms of writing. It's a hopeless task, because she knows, at heart, it's untrue.

Or, to put it another way, it's bullshit.

The problem, it seems to me, is that email encourages people to phrase things conversationally rather than otherwise. Conveying with exactitude the nuances of speech through writing never has been easy. Email does not add to the difficulty.

So use exclamation points if you feel you must, but don't pretend your compulsion is somehow justified by the nature of email (or texts, or other modern communication formats). It isn't.