When I attended Viable Paradise, someone said to me that authors were only allowed one or two exclamation points per work. Other people have heard 5 or 10, but the point is "don’t overuse your exclamation points!"
Unfortunately, a lot of people ignore that rule or follow it without understanding why it’s a rule. I think it’s silly to assign an arbitrary number to the amount of punctuation marks, but a recent discussion about the issue makes me want to blog about it, so here’s a thought.
In college, one of my acting teachers had us do an interesting exercise. We paired off and one person could only ever say "yes" and the other person could only ever say "no." For two or three minutes, that’s all we could say to each other. It was a great method for learning vocal and physical nuances.
If you’re worried about the number of exclamation points in your work, I challenge you to take the words that have the "!" after them, and use them in the exercise (find a buddy). How many ways can you say that statement without the "!" emphasis? How many ways do you say it with the emphasis?
How can you use what you just experimented with as setting and context for the statement (writing it out)?
The one rule I will stick with is only one form of punctuation at the end of the line. Multiple punctuation marks only works in ellipses (…), em-dash stand-ins (–), etc. You shouldn’t end a sentence, or question, with multiple punctuation, even if you really mean it!!!! <- Urg. See what I mean?
I’ve been guilty of using this in fanfic, and occasionally on forum posts. But really, multiple punctuation just doesn’t have a place in anything written. There are better ways to say what you mean.
