“Bertie — let me go!” “But I haven’t got hold of you.” “Release me!” This poignant scene in PG Wodehouse’s Right Ho, Jeeves where the soupy Madeline Bassett imagines she is breaking Bertie Wooster’s heart is unimprovable. At least till now. Ministers are urging that schoolchildren make sparing use of the exclamation mark. New guidance to teachers says that pupils’ written work should avoid ending sentences with exclamation marks unless these begin with “how” or “what”.
The advice is dreary bureaucratese. Creativity cannot be encapsulated in this sort of arbitrary stipulation. Any stylistic tic can grate with repeated use, and HW Fowler noted the tendency of inferior writers to use the exclamation mark to add “a spurious dash of sensation to something unsensational”. Yet there are many legitimate uses of the exclamation mark beyond those cited by the department for education.
Exclamation marks belong naturally with expressions of agreement, challenge, apology and many other exclamatory functions. Indeed, as Madeline Bassett’s anguished statements exemplify, they are the best terminal for use with imperatives. Ministers and their civil servants have overlooked a rapid change in the medium of written prose. Children use text messaging and symbols in a way unimaginable to earlier generations. This no more destroys children’s capacity to communicate than the invention of the telegraph precipitated a collapse in standards of literacy among the Victorians. English orthography has always been a matter of contrivance rather than fixed rules.
In his book Style (1955), FL Lucas lamented the lack of a punctuation mark that would indicate irony. Technology has filled the gap, with the smiley-face emoticon. For the same reason, the popularity of exclamation marks meets a need in the digital age. Ministers cannot stop its advance!