Seven-year-olds are to be marked down in English tests for overusing exclamation marks under new government guidelines that have been dismissed by experts as archaic nonsense.
Children will not be allowed to use exclamation marks at the end of sentences unless they begin with “how” or “what” and include a verb, the Standards and Testing Agency has said in a booklet explaining how spelling, grammar and punctuation tests should be marked this summer.
Ben Fuller, president of the Association for Achievement and Improvement through Assessment, toldSchool Week that he was deeply uncomfortable with the “farcical” guidelines. “Can anyone within the Department for Education justify this extraordinary requirement for seven-year-old children to write in such an old-fashioned tongue?”
John Sutherland, author of How Good Is Your Grammar?, told The Sunday Times: “It is nonsense of the highest degree. ‘Cripes! Yikes!’ Boris Johnson lives by exclamation marks. If you ruled them out, poor old Boris would be deflated like a collapsed balloon.”
The DfE said: “The national curriculum programme for English writing in Year 2 states that pupils should learn how to use sentences with different forms, for example as a statement, question, exclamation and command.”
