Internet Babel

A little grammar rant coming up.

Like many of you I suppose, I’m unfortunate enough to get a couple of Joel Comm emails each day (or so it seems).

I don’t actually read them of course, but I was clearing out my inbox just now and I noticed a highly irresponsible overuse of the ‘!’ character in his messages. From all the Joel mails I had left in my inbox and junk folder, NOT a single one had less than 4 exclamation marks in it! I mean, that’s just incredibly wasteful! Sometimes there were even two exclamation marks placed together!!

Let this be a lesson to you all – overuse of the exclamation mark is neither big nor clever – as Lynne Truss says “In the family of punctuation, where the full stop is Daddy and the comma is Mummy…the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit brother who gets over excited and breaks things and laughs too loudly”. Sound familiar?  

The ‘shout’ or ‘bang’ has his place of course, but overuse is just a cheap and easy way to draw attention in the hope that people won’t notice an associated lack of substance. It’s a tired old trick and in most circumstances shouldn’t be required.

Terry Pratchett has said that placing five exclamation marks in a row is a sure sign of insanity and I’m waiting for the moment when Joel sends me an email containing such a sequence – it surely can’t be long.

Apparently, there is a ‘Netiquette’ guide that actually recommends (incredibly) the increased use of the exclamation mark, on the basis that people viewing online material are so woefully short on brainpower and attention span that liberally sprinkled bangs and shouts are required to maintain their attention.

Ignore these idiots - show some respect for your readers and assume that they don’t need this kind of mental hand-holding, and remember these two guidelines:

• when you feel the urge to type a ‘!’, think carefully first (treat them as precious commodity)
• when you receive a Joel mail, read it with a smile on your face and file accordingly!

Cheers!!!