Now, never let it be said that a writer can’t be as attentive to detail as a scientist. Indeed: a writer is a pathologist of sorts, a forensic pathologist of the soul. (How’s that?) And the whole point of the tragedy of the soul, as any fule kno, is that it is trapped in the material world. And the material world – along with the soul which inhabits it – must be represented in line with certain conventions if people are to get the point.
The exclamation point, that is. Stuart Jeffries in yesterday’s Guardian gave us a terrifying taste of the punctuation our kids are growing up with, and by extension that of the future:
…in the internet age, the exclamation mark is having a renaissance.* In a recent book, Send: The Essential guide to Email for Office and Home, David Shipley and Will Schwalbe make a defence of exclamation marks. They write, for instance, “‘I’ll see you at the conference’ is a simple statement of fact. ‘I’ll see you at the conference!’ lets your fellow conferee know that you’re excited and pleased about the event … ‘Thanks!!!!'”, they contend, “is way friendlier than ‘Thanks’.”
Shipley is comment editor of the New York Times, and Schwalbe, editor-in-chief of Hyperion Books. Those of you thinking that grown men with serious jobs should be above such phrases as “way friendlier” should realise that in the 21st century, adult appropriation of infantilisms is de rigueur, innit? Today, no one reads or cares about Fowler’s Modern English Usage, in which it is maintained: “Except in poetry the exclamation mark should be used sparingly. Excessive use of exclamation marks in expository prose is a sure sign of an unpractised writer or of one who wants to add a spurious dash of sensation to something unsensational.”
Furthermore, grammar and usage being key(s), I will also give you the benefit of the labours of one Jenni Larson, who has done all the work so you never need to let yourself be embarrassed by a cover letter again. Let them be as unsensational as possible!!
In fact, the most cursory look at this list of don’ts is like a guide to the Baroque style:
Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction.
Be more or less specific.
Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary…
I always work on the principle that, being above the rules, I can do what I like. I’m like the English in that way, wearing layered summer skirts with purple tights in February, while the French look on aghast. This list, however, shows my petticoat, and all I can do is thank God it’s clean. (I don’t think she says anything about run-on sentences, dependent clauses or tortured conceits.)
Then again, Stuart reminds us how lucky we are to have these excesses at our disposal. No wonder the Victorians needed actual melodrama to spice up their novels: it was (way) easier than punctuation:
It is important to realise that advances in technology (if that’s what they are) affect how we write. And how we write includes how often we deploy the beloved gasper. Before the 1970s, few manual typewriters were equipped with an exclamation mark key. Instead, if you wanted to express your unbridled joy at – ooh, I don’t know – the budding loveliness of an early spring morning and gild the lily of your purple prose with an upbeat startler, you would have to type a full stop, then back space, push the shift key and type an apostrophe. Which is enough to take the joie de vivre out of anyone’s literary style.
Meanwhile, the conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt has discovered, or discerned, that Mozart’s last three symphonies are in fact an instrumental oratorio. “It’s because the 39th Symphony is the only one with an introduction, and the 41st, the Jupiter, the only one with a proper finale; and that there are thematic connections across all three symphonies – and not just the four-note tag that dominates the finale of the Jupiter.”
That is like poetry. Even poetry without exclamation marks. It’s just how the best poetry works. It’s like some really long poem that you just love because of the rhyme scheme. (And, by the way isn’t it great to know that poets still have permission to use as many of the little blighters as they wanT Not sure whose permission; I think in Roddy Lumsden’s class, for example, he’d probably counsel judiciousness.)
Now, it has been said that there might be some thing a little cold, or restrained, about Mozart. People say they can’t feel it. I don’t see this, myself; I love his human-sized humanity, and his emotional humility. His attention to the audience’s emotions over his own. He is clean, tidy, lush (but throws out the empties after the party) and beautiful. A pattern hidden in three symphonies, just because he could, is something he would have the bigness to do, and the genius not to shout about. It’s like the acrostics in poor George Herbert’s poems that it took three hundred years for anybody to find – like the last six lines of his poem Misery, whose initials spell out HAA HAA. (It makes you wonder, doesn’t it: why do we bother.) It’s a sort of tact, or delicacy…
Then, in the 1880s:
“I write music with an exclamation point! ”
Richard Wagner
And there, m’lud, I rest my case.
(And you can see I’m no scientist. This is a terrible mishmash of a post.)
* N.b., this makes sense: we are, after all, in a New Renaissance.
Baroque in Hackney 