In our fast-paced, Internet-driven world, we are constantly bombarded with “urgent alerts,” “shocking news,” information about “breakthrough formulas,” and “astounding research.” You need to know how to write content that stands out amid a herd that’s bellowing so loudly. The lazy writer will turn to the exclamation mark. By adding fifteen exclamation points, she reasons, she can show just how innovative!/stupendous!/mind-blowing! her content is. (Or by CAPITALIZING or underlining or boldfacing every other word, she calculates that she can at least make you read half of what she wrote.)
But that’s like releasing helium balloons in a room packed with clowns, acrobats, and magicians. No one is going to notice. And that’s why our cultural love affair with the exclamation mark needs to end.
Careful Word Choice and Sentence Crafting
Instead of relying on the exclamation point, you can more effectively build interest with the literary techniques of careful word choice and well-crafted sentences, which take a little more work and time but are well worth it. Look at this passage from Emma Donoghue’s Room about a five-year-old boy’s escape from the man who kidnapped his mother before he was born:
Then bam grabbed from behind, it’s Old Nick, his giant hands on my ribs. I messed up, he catched me, sorry sorry sorry Ma. He’s lifting me up. I scream then, I scream no words even. He’s got me under his arm, he’s carrying me back to the truck, Ma said I could hit, I could kill him, I hit and hit but I can’t reach, it’s only me I’m hitting—
Donoghue uses not a single exclamation point, even when the boy is screaming, but this passage makes you catch your breath nonetheless. Notice how she builds suspense by doing away with other punctuation marks, like periods and commas. The boy is feeling breathless, and the passage mimics that by making you breathless while reading it.
Here’s another example. Consider the first sentence of this article, “Every Step You Take,” by Emily Nussbaum in The New Yorker (October 8, 2018), a review of a new TV show:
Lifetime’s “YOU” starts on a queasy note, with a cliff dive straight into the head of a stalker.
The premise of the show, that we will be seeing from the perspective of a stalker, is dramatic enough, but Nussbaum makes it even more so by referencing the stomach-turning emotion of peering through the stalker’s eyes and using the words “cliff dive,” which hurtle you into a headlong fall, one you can’t stop, into the mind of someone creepy. She could have instead written, “Lifetime’s ‘YOU’ starts from the perspective of a stalker!” But that exclamation point adds nothing to what would have been a most unexciting sentence.
Finding the perfectly right words (queasy, cliff dive) and setting the right pace by using punctuation sparingly or in clever ways are more effective means of drumming up excitement.
The Physicality of Language
Excitement is not an intellectual process. It is something you feel in your body. That’s one reason it makes little sense to rely on a symbol to evoke it. Language is a vibrant tool, not simply a Morse Code message conveying meaning solely through dots and dashes. Think of language more like a dance, something physical that you feel, that can tire you out, that can energize you, that requires you to interact with your readers. When you write, put your body into it.
Here is how Dan Brown injected physicality into his passage in The Boys in the Boat about the race that qualified the University of Washington crew team for the 1936 Olympics:
As they entered the last half mile and came into the lee of the hills at the north end of the lake, the headwind died down. Cheers began to rise from the semicircle of boats ahead, from the beaches, from the observation train working its way along the shore, and—loudest of all—from the ferryboat chock-full of students. The California boat labored to catch up, Grover Clark’s whistle now shrieking like an out-of-control steam locomotive. Approaching the line and already ahead by four lengths, George Morry finally called for a higher stroke rate. The Washington boys stepped it up to thirty-two and then all the way to thirty-six, just because they knew they could. Washington sliced across the finish line four and a half lengths ahead of California, and almost twenty seconds ahead of the freshman course record, despite the headwind.
We can hear the cheers with our own ears. We can feel the breathless exertion of jumping from thirty-two to thirty-six strokes per minute. Words like shrieking and sliced create strong sensations. Brown mentions the observation train and then compares the coxswain’s whistle to a train whistle, and that works because we already had the picture of the train in our minds. Just like the moving train, our perspective is moving along with that of the rowers. Brown makes us feel like we are with the boys in the boat, excited to have won our race.
Do Some Research
Even when you’re talking, you’re not relying on exclamation marks—shouting—as much as some print advertisements and marketing pitches do. Conduct a little experiment. The next time you get worked up about something and you need to share it with someone, pay attention to the strategies you use to convey your excitement or agitation.
Are you simply yelling? Or, more likely, are you carefully choosing your words, altering your pacing and the lengths of your sentences, and making emphatic hand gestures? Those same strategies will work in writing—simply substitute repetition, questions, pauses created by punctuation, and written sounds for the hand gestures.
When you read through your dozens of daily e-mails, notice which messages grab your attention and how. Are additional exclamation points drawing more of your interest? Probably not. Instead, you’ll either be pulled in or refracted by the content of the messages, the structure of the sentences, the words that are used, the way punctuation is employed.
Keep a list of effective sentences. Once you have a small collection, you should be able to identify some patterns. What are the strategies that usually have an energizing effect on you? Are you enticed by word choice, sentence structure, and careful use of punctuation marks? How do the sentences use punctuation in effective ways? What bores you? Why?
Also notice when the exclamation point is effective. You will likely discover that when you are communicating briefly via e-mail or text messages, the exclamation point is useful for—not conveying excitement—but instead for conveying tone. For example, if your boss asks you to rewrite something, and you respond, “I’m on it!” the exclamation mark helps show your boss that you are rapidly and energetically following her instruction. Or if you are expressing gratitude to a friend in a text message, you’ll find that “Thanks!” is a friendlier response than “Thanks.”
With and Without !
Let’s say you’re writing a book about being more conscious of the decisions people make in their lives. Compare these two approaches:
Approach 1
Before you sit down at your desk, think of what you want to accomplish during the day. Even if you try just this one strategy from my program, you’re going to feel more full of energy! You’ll also free yourself from self-doubt!
Approach 2
Before you sit down at your desk, think of what you want to accomplish during the day. Even this one simple strategy will release you from the dull weight of repetitive, mindless activity. The consciousness with which you will now approach your work will strengthen your confidence about what you are doing and how you are doing it. It will even change how you approach tasks to make your work more effective.
Notice how the second passage gives the reader more information about why the strategy works. It describes a lack of consciousness as a heavy weight. The words “dull weight of repetitive, mindless activity” are a mouthful; the words themselves are difficult to say, just like a heavy weight is hard to carry. The reader can imagine how freeing it would be to shake off that heaviness.
The second passage goes on to describe how consciousness can chisel away self-doubt by imbuing work with meaning and purpose. The first passage doesn’t bother to convince us; it just asks us to accept the writer’s promise.
How to Write with Excitement
No reader should ever have to take a writer’s word for it, that something simply is exciting. Effective, excitement-building writing does the work in advance. Through careful word choice and sentence crafting, the writer generates excitement. By making the writing as much an experience of the body as of the mind, the writer triggers a reader’s excitement response, through sensations and rhythm. By conducting your own research into what writing excites you and what turns you off, you can develop your own methods for how to write in a way that captures your readers’ attention. That is something worth getting excited about.
“Exclamation” image by donnamarijne is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.