How to Write

Exclamations and Questions

Introduction

There are two punctuation marks that seem fairly straight forward, and quite frankly, they are! These two marks tend to change the way you say the last couple words in a sentence and that in turn changes the way the entire sentence is viewed. Now, if you paid any attention to the title of this chapter, you’d see right away that the two marks I’m talking about are the exclamation point and the question mark.

My goal is to help you understand when you want to use these two punctuation marks, because believe it or not, there is a time to let the reader decide whether or not something is an exclamation or simply a statement. Sometimes it’s up to the reader to throw on the questioning tone or leave it a kind of unsaid question. We’ll talk about this more in later chapters but there’s a little unsaid rule that you should always keep in mind when writing: write in such a way that the reader can take some liberties! So without further ado, let’s get right to it!

Exclamations

The Exclamation mark is a tricky piece of punctuation to master: if you overuse it, you sound like a six-year-old writing a story for his mommy — cute, but not when you’re a teenager; underuse it and you appear to be a science professor who decided to dabble in fantasy — neat and boring. If you really want to master the exclamation point then you must understand why we use it! Let me say that again, you must understand why we use it.

The exclamation mark is used to express a rise in emotions — usually excitement — as opposed to the period which normally doesn’t have anything to do with emotions. The exclamation mark is really the only mark that’s consistently linked to the emotions. Why is this important to know? Because manipulating the emotions of a reader is what tempts them to continue reading. If you over manipulate the emotions your reader can tell that you’re trying too hard and yet, if you under manipulate their emotions, they lose interest.

So how do we find that perfect medium? I already told you! I’ll bet you didn’t even notice. All you have to do is write in such a way that the reader can take some liberties. What that means is sometimes you’ll use a period when you could have used an exclamation and most of the time the reader will subconsciously change the period to an exclamation point! Now, that being said, remember not to under use the exclamation point. I can’t tell you how much to use it because it changes for each piece of work and it changes for each writer based on their style, but I can give you a few guidelines:

• If you’re writing to people under thirteen, use more exclamation points.

• If you’re writing to people thirteen or older, use less exclamation points.

• If you’re writing fiction/fantasy, use more exclamation points.

• If you’re writing non-fiction, use less exclamation points.

• If you’re writing dialogue, use more exclamation points.

• If you’re writing narrative, use less exclamation points.

Question

If you have a question, ask it, but beware, this is such a thing as a stupid question. When asking a question in your writing you have to be careful, you don’t want it to look like you have to ask a question in order to keep people engaged! Now, sometimes you do and that’s okay, but if you rely on it too much then people will notice. Once they notice, you’ll swarm you like bees after you smacked their hive. Oftentimes when you’re writing a novel it’s best to leave the questions for characters to either ask or think. Don’t implant them into your narrative. The question mark is simple like that: put it where there’s a question and don’t ask too many questions.

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On Your Own Questions:

5.1 When using the Exclamation point or the question mark, what part of the sentence is normally changed?

5.2 What’s an unsaid rule when writing?

5.3 What do you appear to be when you overuse the exclamation point?

5.4 What do you appear to be when you underuse the exclamation point?

5.5 What’s unique about the exclamation point?

5.6 What happens when you overuse the exclamation point?

5.7 What happens when you underuse the exclamation point?

5.8 Why can there be stupid questions?

5.9 Why don’t you want to use questions in your narrative?

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