“If you’ve spent any time trolling the blogosphere, you’ve probably noticed a peculiar literary trend: the pervasive habit of writers inexplicably placing exclamation points at the end of otherwise unremarkable sentences. Sort of like this! This is done to suggest an ironic detachment from the writing of an expository sentence! It’s supposed to signify that the writer is self-aware! And this is idiotic. It’s the saddest kind of failure. F. Scott Fitzgerald believed inserting exclamation points was the literary equivalent of an author laughing at his own jokes, but that’s not the case in the modern age; now, the exclamation point signifies creative confusion. All it illustrates is that even the writer can’t tell if what they’re creating is supposed to be meaningful, frivolous, or cruel. It’s an attempt to insert humor where none exists, on the off chance that a potential reader will only be pleased if they suspect they’re being entertained. Of course, the reader really isn’t sure, either. They just want to know when they’re supposed to pretend that they’re amused. All those extraneous exclamation points are like little splatters of canned laughter: They represent the “form of funny,” which is more easily understood (and more easily constructed) than authentic funniness. I suppose the counter-argument is that Tom Wolfe used a lot of exclamation points, too… but I don’t think that had anything to do with humor or insecurity. The Wolfe-Man was honestly stoked about LSD and John Glenn. I bet he didn’t even own a TV. It was a different era!”—
Chuck Klosterman, Eating the Dinosaur (via fimoculous)
Shots fired.
(via youngmanhattanite)
I disagree.
(via doree)I have noticed the peculiar literary trend of writers compulsively writing Humourous Essays about how some piece of 30-year-old pop cultural ephemera (or basketball) totally explains So Much About Society When You Think About It, but no, I hadn’t noticed the exclamation point thing.
It’s pretty sad when Chuck Klosterman is the one pointing out one of our most overused crutches in blogdom. But he’s right, the sarcastic “!” is too often a joke replacement. Remember when Jess and Jesse were running Gawker and the commenters thought they needed more “!”? Turns out they didn’t. When I copy-edit a certain other commercial blog, I sometimes scrape out loads of OMG WTF !?!? Sarcastic aside (((EXCUSE FOR THE SARCASTIC ASIDE))), because that’s what bloggers do now, because we’re all too afraid to publish something without “punching it up.”
Exclamation marks are to blogging what explosions are to movies. Make sure they have a point, or see if you can’t replace them with a character moment.
