Stephen Drivick's Blog - Posts Tagged "exclamation-point"
Yelling
This is my seventeenth entry for the April A to Z Blogging Challenge. Today we look at Y-Yelling.
There's a great Seinfeld episode (remember Seinfeld?) where Elaine is editing a book. She has a fight over exclamation points, so to prove her point she adds exclamation points to every sentence in the rough draft. The next day while going over the book with the head of the publishing company, Elaine tries to explain, but the boss just tells her to get rid of them. He hated exclamation points.
I was reminded of that episode when I started self-editing Sometimes We Ran.
A zombie novel has a good amount of action. Your characters have to get away from the undead and other various bad guys in a hostile, post-apocalyptic world. There's a lot of running, shooting, and bashing of skulls. There's also a lot of yelling.
While I was writing those various scenes, I didn't realize I had used so many exclamation points. (Look out! Shoot it!, etc.) Most of the people in the book seemed to be yelling at each other all the time. Sometimes it was two or three sentences in a row. It was a mess.
I spent a long couple of days removing exclamation points. Just like Elaine from Seinfeld.
I learned my lesson. You can still use the occasional exclamation point for emphasis, but try to keep the number to a reasonable amount. You don't want your characters to strain their voice from yelling all the time. :)
There's a great Seinfeld episode (remember Seinfeld?) where Elaine is editing a book. She has a fight over exclamation points, so to prove her point she adds exclamation points to every sentence in the rough draft. The next day while going over the book with the head of the publishing company, Elaine tries to explain, but the boss just tells her to get rid of them. He hated exclamation points.
I was reminded of that episode when I started self-editing Sometimes We Ran.
A zombie novel has a good amount of action. Your characters have to get away from the undead and other various bad guys in a hostile, post-apocalyptic world. There's a lot of running, shooting, and bashing of skulls. There's also a lot of yelling.
While I was writing those various scenes, I didn't realize I had used so many exclamation points. (Look out! Shoot it!, etc.) Most of the people in the book seemed to be yelling at each other all the time. Sometimes it was two or three sentences in a row. It was a mess.
I spent a long couple of days removing exclamation points. Just like Elaine from Seinfeld.
I learned my lesson. You can still use the occasional exclamation point for emphasis, but try to keep the number to a reasonable amount. You don't want your characters to strain their voice from yelling all the time. :)
