The exclamation mark!!!!!!!!

Maybe I'm a bit pedantic, but am I entirely alone in my despair at the increasing misuse of the exclamation mark?


I believe it is symptomatic of general lowering of standards. It says to me that the writer simply didn't put any thought into the sentence they wrote and so instead of carefully constructing a sentence to convey a point, they simply fill it with superfluous punctuation which I think is meant to tell us that that sentence is sufficiently important that we must make the effort to read it several times to try to derive the meaning, rather than the words actually giving us the details clearly.

Anyway, here's a nice little article I found that might help explain the correct use of the exclamation mark.

http://www.thewritingsite.org/dont-abuse-exclamation-mark/

 

Nice one!

 

OMG! The author of that article can't even get quotation marks in the correct place!

How appalling that somebody criticising poor punctuation can't even get it right themselves. A screenshot before they discover their error and correct it!

 

I didn't know I had one, but I've found it now!

 

Guilty as charged, my lud!

 

They are giving an example of how not to use it.

 

The example is correct, but their punctuation is incorrect. If you quote text with an exclamation mark at the end, the closing parenthesis should be after the exclamation mark, as in their following example.

They are supposed to be quoting incorrect usage, but the way they have miss- punctuated means they are guilty of same sort of grammatical crime that they are criticising. A really shoddy article.

 

There are no parentheses in the bit you quoted.

 

OK, sorted:

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Unless the offending quotation mark is after the exclamation mark it isn't quoted and the 'incorrect' usage becomes that of the author, not of whoever they are quoting.

 

Nope, sorry, still no parentheses unless my eyes are failing me, which is possible. I can see the ones you've put in, but none in the article.

 

Clueless, I had two when I was a wee Boy ,with a speech impediment , two Parenth.

 

Looks like I'd best go and check all my posts, see you in a couple of years.

 

I'm bad at spelling and writing, so it's back to school for me, but i'm a slow learner so it's going to be harder for me to get it right, please forgive of all that i write, it is hard for me to write but i do try my best honst

 

Yes Clu. you ARE indeed being pedantic.
Why you think gardeners are in the slightest bit interested in your pedantic trivia,I don't know!!!!!