On the Mark

How do you feel about exclamation marks? Otherwise known as gaspers, screamers, dog’s cocks, or shrieks. In his Modern English Usage, Fowler said that using too many betrays an “uneducated or unpractised writer”. Martin Amis called them “joke badges”, and Theodor Adorno “soundless cymbal-crashing”. The novelist Elmore Leonard specified that you were allowed only two or three every 100,000 words. He was being generous. Steven Poole, The Guardian

recensione di: On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World by Florence Hazrat is published by Basic