Invasion of the exclamation marks!

FORMAL REFERENCE:

Sanders, Lisa. "Invasion of the exclamation marks!." BusinessWeek no. 3477 (May 27, 1996): 8. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed April 8, 2011).

RELEVANT SECTIONS: All

SUMMARY:

The author does some basic research and finds that technology companies are increasingly using exclamation points in their company names—over 969 companies in the tech sector alone. They use them for different purposes, some to convey excitement and others to convey intensity or emphasis. Sanders concludes that, in her opinion, these company names “fail” if the mark is appended to a business name word that has little to do with a typical use of an exclamation mark, especially those that convey thrill—for example, “Yahoo!” is indeed an interjection, but something like “Walton!” does not fit our normal context.

ASSESSMENT:

This is not a scholarly publication—BusinessWeek is a business magazine. The article has not been peer-reviewed, and the author is a Public Relations consultant and was only a BusinessWeek staffer at the time of publication (1996, not all that recent, though this topic isn’t exactly time-specific).

REFLECTION:

I’m not sure I’ll use this article in my research proposal, though it may have a point in further arguing that we have definite expected contexts for exclamation marks, and that using them “wrong” can have real-world negative effects like business failure. Further, that “thrill” may be one interpretation of exclamation marks.

KEYWORDS AND LABELS:

exclamation marks, real-world effects, misuse, interpretation, non-academic