Yeah, I guest that could have been it.
So anyway. I told them that they could get some extra credit points by visiting here and commenting when they saw an article about writing. I know, I'm a big ole softy, but HELLO!!!! This is the one for this week!!!!!
And I'm speaking of exclamation points.
To anyone with a third-grade education, an exclamation point expresses excitement. I hear the intro music to Schoolhouse Rock right now.
(Oh, oops, I'm showing my age. For those of you who didn't grow up in the 70s and 80s, SR played little educational tunes with dancing cartoon characters between commercials during Saturday morning kid's programming. They taught me what a Bill was, all about conjunctions and adverbs, and I still use the "Little Twelve-toes" song to remember the 12 multiplication table.)
The exclamation point was highlighted in the Interjections video. "For excitement or emotion, they're generally set apart from a sentence by an exclamation point, or by a comma when the feeling's not as strong."
Only I'm learning that those cool looking little punctuation marks that I used to dot with a heart aren't to be used in professional writing. Oh my gosh! I mean ... Oh my gosh.
From what I understand, those marks put a broad neon sign on my manuscript that blinks saying, "Novice, beginner, amateur." I'm so glad I learned that before I did much in the way of shopping my manuscript! Oops.
I can only guess that the mark became so woefully overused by freshman writers (No, not ya'll, I'm talking about newbies on the publishing scene at this point, like me.) that they detracted from the writing rather than adding to it.
I can live with that. I scaled my novel down from its several hundred points to only about 125. Okay, make it 75. Can I keep in about 30? But I really like that one!
Yes, I sacrificed every single one of those cute little dots on the pyres of writing professionalism. Rest in peace.
By the way, I can't think of any circumstance where an exclamation point could possibly be appropriate for expository writing. Hint. Hint.
Is there an acceptable time to use the exclamation point in fiction or non-fiction writing? I'd love to hear your opinion! Oops, did it again.
