Paragraph of the Day
May. 9th, 2007 10:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alanajoliAs an overuser of exclamation points in chatting, I found this paragraph of the day (from tpotd.net) extremely amusing.
Exclamation points are the most irritating of all. Look! They say, look at what I just said! How amazing is my thought! It is like being forced to watch someone else’s small child jumping up and down crazily in the center of the living room shouting to attract attention. If a sentence really has something of importance to say, something quite remarkable, it doesn’t need a mark to point it out. And if it is really, after all, a banal sentence needing more zing, the exclamation mark simply emphasizes its banality!
Lewis Thomas, "On Punctuation," from Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail (1979)
Exclamation points are the most irritating of all. Look! They say, look at what I just said! How amazing is my thought! It is like being forced to watch someone else’s small child jumping up and down crazily in the center of the living room shouting to attract attention. If a sentence really has something of importance to say, something quite remarkable, it doesn’t need a mark to point it out. And if it is really, after all, a banal sentence needing more zing, the exclamation mark simply emphasizes its banality!
Lewis Thomas, "On Punctuation," from Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail (1979)
