Part of my (strictly limited) daily time on line consists of checking out two British news websites: the BBC and the Guardian newspaper. The other day I was delighted to read an article titled "The return of the exclamation mark."
Now, I know I don't usually blog about writing matters, but this struck a chord with me. The gist of the article was that use of exclamation marks in composition used to be frowned upon, but emails and blogs have changed all that. And I'm glad of it! I think there've been some arbitrary 'good writing' rules that for me are just nonsense. I mean, why not use an exclamation mark? It's a perfectly valid form of punctuation, and if we're now swinging towards using far too many, so be it.
Then there's that other 'good writing' rule which says you should prefer 'he said', or 'she said' above all other dialogue tags. Surely this cuts out a whole lot of useful words, and English, by its nature, is blessed with an abundance of words. For instance, it's not considered good to use he murmured, he burst out, she cried, she insisted and so on. Personally, I think it's nonsense. I mean, how do you react to these two sentences?
'How beautiful,' she said.
'How beautiful!' she exclaimed.
Doesn't the second version call up more of a response in you?
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