OMG!!! Seven-year-olds who have grown up in a world of social media have been told to curb their use of exclamation marks in new rules for grammar tests this summer.
Teachers are up in arms over the latest guidance from schools ministers about when children should use an exclamation mark. They claim that it is old-fashioned, unhelpful — and possibly wrong. Ministers, however, are understood to believe that seven-year-olds are overusing the punctuation mark — especially in texts and social media posts — and are determined to cut its use.
According to the guidance, sentences ending with an exclamation mark can be marked correct only if they begin with “How” or “What” when teachers assess pupils’ written work this summer.
“What a lovely day!” and “How exciting!” are two of the examples contained in a detailed booklet setting out how this summer’s spelling, grammar and punctuation tests and assessments should be marked.
“A sentence that ends in an exclamation mark, but which does not have one of the grammatical patterns shown above, is not considered to be creditworthy as an exclamation,” according to the new guidelines. However, teachers say young children use exclamation marks all the time — especially in text messages. They warn the guidance may deter seven-year-olds from writing creatively. They also say the books that children read are crammed with such marks. A few pages taken at random from the Biff and Chip books, for instance, feature “Let’s go!”, “I don’t like dragons!” and “Come on!”.
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This weekend the instructions were dismissed as confusing and inaccurate by John Sutherland, emeritus Lord Northcliffe professor of modern English literature at University College London and the author of How Good Is Your Grammar?. “Donnez-moi a break!” he said. “I think the guidance is ridiculous. It is quite impossible to follow these instructions.
“Exclamation marks are interpretative and they depend on knowing the contextual situation in which the speech takes place. ‘Cripes! Yikes!’ Boris Johnson lives by exclamation marks. If you ruled them out, poor old Boris would be deflated like a collapsed balloon.
“It is nonsense of the highest degree. I am not surprised teachers wearily sigh when these instructions come down from Whitehall.”
Ben Fuller, lead assessment adviser for key stage 1 in Hertfordshire, said: “The required form of ‘exclamation sentence’ does not seem to be a natural form of expression for a 21st-century seven-year-old to use in either spoken or written language. Can anyone within the Department for Education justify this extraordinary requirement for seven-year-old children to write in such an old-fashioned tongue?”
Professor Alan Smithers, of the University of Buckingham, said: “Grammar is always evolving, especially with the interchange of text messages and prose. Children see exclamation marks in a lot of what they read . . . To knock them back for experimenting with punctuation seems absurd.”
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The Department for Education said: “A high-quality education in English — and the ability to communicate effectively — is an important part of the government’s commitment to extend opportunity to all.”