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Exclamation Marks!!!!!!!!!!

What I enjoy most about teaching in brick and mortar classrooms is the immediate feedback student facial expressions reveal, all along the spectrum of understanding, from total confusion to synthesis to Aha!


One memorable group Aha! moment happened during a writing workshop in which the piece up for discussion included many!!! sentences of dialogue!!! with multiple!!! exclamation points!!! throughout!!!


Any inclusion of this punctuation mark can be divisive, I know, but the excessive conversational enthusiasms weren’t at issue.


Instead, I pointed out that we don’t use multiple periods in a row to mean “this is really, really, REALLY the end of the sentence,” so we don’t need more than one exclamation point.


In a way, this is very much a Coco Chanel moment.


Look in the mirror—your writing—and take something out. Understatement, simplicity, whatever you want to call it, can be powerful: the absence a stronger presence than the thing itself.




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