!!!

FORMAL REFERENCE:
Morris, Jan. "!!!." Wall Street Journal - Eastern Edition, June 28, 2006., A14, Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed March 31, 2011).

RELEVANT SECTIONS: All

SUMMARY:

This appears to be an opinion piece. In it, the author describes the exclamation mark and its current use, referring to it as “the most sensitive of these grammatical symbols, and the most crudely threatened by ignorant fashion.” The author notes, in support of many others, that “every year fewer practitioners dare to employ it” and that “editors routinely remove exclamation mark, as they are signs of illiteracy.”

Of value is the statement that “The exclamation mark remains the same whatever the thought it is illustrating, but its meaning miraculously shifts. It is like a written tone of voice. It can be, of course, exclamatory, but it can also magically signify humor, horror, sarcasm and a host of other emotions.” Also, “In short, you can do almost anything with the exclamation mark.”

ASSESSMENT:
The Wall Street Journal is widely respected, but it is not scholarly. The author is not a linguist or academic—she is a travel book author. However, as a Wall Street Journal contributor and author, she does have the authority to describe current usage.

REFLECTION:

I’m not sure I can use this as much more than support for more scholarly references. It will be good in support of the idea that the mark is growing more and more frowned on in formal linguistic settings such as editing, however.

KEYWORDS AND LABELS:

exclamation mark, dismissal, herd mentality, non-academic

Comma-sense punctuation

FORMAL REFERENCE:
Thomas, Lewis. "Comma-sense punctuation." Writer 114, no. 2 (February 2001): 10. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed March 26, 2011).

RELEVANT SECTIONS: All

SUMMARY:

This article, from a writer’s magazine, puts down an onslaught against exclamation marks. Quote:

Exclamation points are the most irritating of all. Look! they say, look at what I just said! How amazing is my thought! It is like being forced to watch someone else's small child jumping up and down crazily in the center of the living room shouting to attract attention. If a sentence really has something of importance to say, something quite remarkable, it doesn't need a mark to point it out. And if it is really, after all, a banal sentence needing more zing, the exclamation point simply emphasizes its banality!

Further: “A single exclamation point in a poem, no matter what else the poem has to say, is enough to destroy the whole work.”

There is no data or research to back this up, but this subject, after all, is largely qualitative. This article was published in a writer’s magazine, and the other descriptions of punctuation in the article were accurate and helpful—this article was intended to be helpful to other writers. This fact makes the mention all the more interesting: writers are told by other writers to avoid punctuation marks, often for quite heartfelt reasons.

ASSESSMENT:
This article is a reprint of a section of Medusa and the Snail from 1979, by the same author. I am choosing not to cite that reference, because the context of this being published in a writer’s magazine is more important than a book.

Lewis Thomas is definitely an accomplished writer and author. He won a National Book Award in 1974 and his articles have appeared in pretty much every respected larger medium (NYT, SciAm, The Atlantic, Harpers). He was a professor of pediatric research at the U of M and was dean of Yale Medical School. So, his view would represent an academic perspective.

REFLECTION:

I will use this as the strongest example of the case being made against the use of exclamation marks, noting that if this is the case, it will need actual research to back it up—and if this sentiment is wrong, there’s a huge linguistic opportunity in the use of exclamation marks.

KEYWORDS AND LABELS:

exclamation mark, dismissal

Justice and the human alarm system: The impact of exclamation points and flashing lights on the justice judgment process

FORMAL REFERENCE:
Rijpkema, Mark et al. "Justice and the human alarm system: The impact of exclamation points and flashing lights on the justice judgment process." Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 44, no. 2 (March 2008): 201-219. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed March 26, 2011).

RELEVANT SECTIONS: pp 203-216

SUMMARY:

“… it should be the case that presenting social cues that are even only subtly related to alarming conditions will lead people to form more extreme procedural and outcome justice judgments…. we will test the implications of this line of reasoning by presenting exclamation points … to our participants. We argue that people have learned to associate exclamation points with signals to be alert that something is or will be going on.”

This social psychology paper used exclamation points in two experiments, hypothesizing that seeing an exclamation point alone would cause participants to become more alert or alarmed, which would then heighten sensitivity to alarming situations related to social justice/fairness. Interestingly, the hypothesis was verified: participants were indeed more sensitive or extreme in their judgments.

This basically establishes that, at least on its own, the exclamation mark heightens alertness and/or alarm. It really does grab the attention, perhaps because people have been conditioned to view the symbol as an imperative or emphatic relation to danger or warning.

ASSESSMENT:
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology is reputable and peer-reviewed. While the researchers and study were Netherlands-based, they represent major research institutions such as Utrecht and Duke (taken abroad, I guess). The research is current (2008) and the sample size was above 100 in each test. The literature review was quite long, and the study itself was based on a related avenue of research about the “human alarm system.” My review concluded that the authors have published other papers, in some cases many other papers.

REFLECTION:

I will use this to establish that one previously-investigated interpretation of exclamation marks is that of alarm and heightened awareness, but mentioning that the latter is only implied as it was only sought in the context of social fairness. Therefore, we should investigate this further in a more specific context. The authors suggest further research, though not into exclamation marks specifically.

KEYWORDS AND LABELS:

exclamation mark, alarm, clear research, interpretation, alertness, association