Pity the exclamation point! It gets a bad rap but has a noble history.

For the past three years, I’ve been researching the history of exclamation points — and in the course of my research (beginning with parentheses), I’ve run into the opposite over and over again. !I began to wonder if the exclamation point really is, as The Penguin’s Guide to Punctuation puts it, “breathtaking, almost childish.” I read on in hopes that someone would publish a manifesto defending the abused mark, but I didn’t find anything. As someone turned out to be me.

what i like ! It’s the unabashed sentiment that makes a no-nonsense style guide offensive. Exclamation marks encode emotions. Indeed, since its first appearance in the 1340s, ! It has been praised for capturing the emotions of the author and inspiring the emotions of the reader.

of ! It sprouts from an era that has existed for hundreds of years with commas, colons and question marks.However, the Italian scholar Arpoleio da Urbisaglia found with dismay that people read what he called “praise sentences” as statements and questions, undermining both meaning and effect. In the Latin treatise “The Art of Punctuating”,” Arpoleio proposed a new mark to denote “admiration and amazement” by a period at the end of a line and an apostrophe hanging from the beginning of a line. ! Born to address the explicit need for emotion in text.

Great books by Amy Klaus Rosenthal include Exclamation Mark!

Renaissance writers valued persuasion and were willing to use whatever means at their disposal to persuade their readers. feltAs a result, the exclamation mark spread rapidly across Europe from manuscript to manuscript, expanding its sphere of influence and expressing strong emotions beyond admiration and surprise.

! It happily coasted on to provide effective rhetoric until changes occurred at the end of the 19th century. Its echoes still dictate our current critical attitudes. We’ve come to prefer the clean straight lines of Bauhaus buildings to the mischievous swirls of Renaissance palaces, and we’ve come to doubt emotion in all forms of public or private life. During the Victorian era, language was forced into the shackles of right and wrong on both sides of the Atlantic. Along with the zeitgeist of quantification, linguistics has established itself as an exact science that leaves little room for ambiguity, experimentation, excess, and conscious deviation. These are the hallmarks of a living, breathing language.

Review: “Index, History of the” by Dennis Duncan

Influential home writing guides such as The King’s English (1906) by the Fowler brothers. !!! “Betray the Uneducated” has helped banish the exclamation mark to the two areas where emotional persuasion is most important: propaganda and advertising during wartime. .it wasn’t even dedicated ! I kept hitting typewriter keys until the 1980s — before that, I had to perform an intricate period-backspace-apostrophe dance to go back to the old days of exclamation points. Only those who are truly dedicated to shouting go to such lengths.

but ! was just hiding and planning a comeback. And it’s back…with revenge: Smartphone technology allows you to generate strings with no additional effort by simply leaving thumbbbbbbbb on any of the hundreds of keys available. The declared goal of the media is informal, near-instantaneous human communication. Put another way, it’s all about emotions.

It seems almost obvious that the exclamation mark will rise again when smartphones and the web emerge and the forces converge.But our increase doesn’t stop there !!!!!!!! That’s not all. The Internet is a very immaterial space. All the writing is not embodied, but with the rise of digital communication there is no longer any reminder of the writer’s actual existence. There is no paper to touch, creases or wrinkles to look at, or individual letter forms to scrutinize, underlines, scratches or licked stamps. Both the writer and the reader are reduced to electronic impulses as if they never existed in flesh and blood. It’s precisely because exclamation points are so emotional that they can bridge the existential gap. ! They look friendlier than those who don’t.

In their 2007 book, Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better, David Shipley (now editorial page editor for The Washington Post) and Will Schwalbe argue that using an exclamation point makes other Dot suggests that flat tones can give a welcoming feel. Restore the email from the bottom of the punctuation hierarchy. Spice up your email game with strategically placed exclamation points here and there, and don’t forget to include at least one message in the first message you swipe to. According to one study, he could increase his chances of dating by 10%.

The exclamation mark went through a rough patch before and during President Trump’s presidency.In his 12 years on the Little Blue Bird platform, Donald Trump reportedly made 56,000 tweets, including 33,000 !seconds. That’s a lot of yelling. It fueled the perceived shrieks and political divisions in the United States and abroad at the time.Relations with ex-president still strong, but users are trying to win back ! As a sign of spontaneous enthusiasm and authenticity.

But another threat lurks right there: emojis. Small pictures take over part. !Add empathy to your text messages in the traditional territory of In recent years, the number of emojis has exploded and is increasing year by year. As a tester, you’ll have to scroll through a long list of similar photos to find the exact one that fits your needs. Then, as a reader, you need to recognize which emoji you are confronted with and spend your time and attention interpreting what it means in relation to the words that surround it. Exclamation points are much more economical, effective, and suitable for quick text message exchanges. Its shape is unmistakable and its message is clear. Here are the emotions! pay attention!

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Emojis may naturally disappear in a few years and be replaced by newer technologies, but the 700-year-old exclamation mark is going nowhere. And thank you! We need to keep using it — and it should be free. And joy! But be careful: Boomers are allergic to exclamation marks. So if you want to keep the peace at your next family reunion with your in-laws, you better go during a boring time!

Florence Hazrat is “Good point: A brief history of exclamation marks!I am a writer and researcher from Berlin who loves punctuation and Shakespeare.