My issue is when they are misused, like Tom Cruise in a Jack Reacher flick.Īlso, I was groomed in the news department, where summoning an exclamation point is recognized and damned as an expression of opinion. Moving to the Opinion pages in recent years meant adapting to the writing of contributors.Ī student in a class my wife and I teach at UConn recently stepped to the board and wrote a news lede that ended with an exclamation point. There seems to be no limit to the emphasis some writers resort to in the interest of making a point.
The result is typically something like “It’s ridiculous that OUR TOWN would be asked to help the town next door!!!!!!” They try to underscore their chosen theme first by bolding it, then italicizing, and so on. I’ll send the ransom money if you’ll please just stop.Ĭolin and I traced the secret origin of my disdain to comic books. I grew up watching the 1960s “ Batman” TV series, which punctuated fight scenes with “Z-ZWAP!” “WHAMMM!” “VRONK!” “FLRBBBB!” etc.Įven in this use of onomatopoeia, the writers usually used only single exclamation points (there were exceptions, such as “ZGRPPP!!”). And, by the way, the likes of “URKKK” definitely seem worthy. So the Bright Night gets points for proper grammar.īatman’s print counterpart and peers … not so much. Pick up a contemporaneous comic book and the marks end every single sentence. The true superhero of the industry was Stan Lee, who tried to ban them in the 1970s. Bridgeport public housing tenants facing 'eviction tsunami'.Periods didn’t always show up well on pulp pages, leaving Spider-Man to ramble on to the Green Goblin in run-on sentences.Īpparently, they served a purpose all along.
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