Sunset, Wednesday, 14 October 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Without meaning to, editorial demon Aime Ballard-Wood corrected me today on my post from Sunday about the overuse of what I was calling ‘exclamation marks’. After writing to me about yesterday’s post on the World Series (she commented, “Afternoon baseball: Hell yeah!” and I replied, “I was feeling like a lonely lunatic!”), Aime said, “Did you have to think about that exclamation point?”

Point? Not mark?

(My response, incidentally, was to give her my best Rex Harrison: They’re second nature to me now/ Like breathing out and breathing in ...)

When I asked Aime about it, she said:

I’ve always said, and I quite like, exclamation point. I like it so much that I refuse to try to look it up. 

It fell to me to do the grueling work. So after three minutes I came up with:

Exclamation point/mark? Chicago [The Chicago Manual of Style – online here, although I was referring to the print edition on my shelf] uses only ‘point’, dumb as rocks Wikipedia leads with ‘marks’ – that alone lends a lot of weight to points, as does the preponderance of ‘marks’ via Google. I liked the sound of marks but will have to go with points.

So I went to my post from Sunday and changed it. Evidence of my Exclamation Mark Period [sic?] is already being covered over by the shifting cybersands.

We ended our discussion as follows.

BILL: Doesn’t it suck that we’re doing this when we should be watching October afternoon baseball?

AIME [exclaims]: Yes!

Sunset, Sunday, 11 October 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

A note on how e-mail and, perhaps even more than that, Facebook, have altered the playing field for writers. “West Hollywood,” a poem from 1982 that I posted the other day, originally had two exclamation points that were very important to the piece – but my spouse observed, and I realized she was right, that these would not register the same way now. I took them out.

Exclamation points are now anything but exceptional in everyday communication. I started adding them more and more to my own e-mails, simply from the awareness that without them most of my correspondents might think what I was saying sounded flat, cold or even angry. They’re almost useless!

We agreed Walt Whitman might have a tough time if he were writing today.