Let's talk about the exclamation mark, or
exclamation point, which we use to show a strong sense of
emotion. So an example would be with
interjections, and interjections, if you
recall, are a part of speech.
And examples of these would be "ouch" or "sorry"
or "alas" and "alack" if you're
really old-fashioned, and in each of these
cases you can use an exclamation mark to
show that strong sense of emotion. Same
thing with declarative sentences, so
basically statements or descriptions. If
you are surprised, or you have a sense of
pain, or you're amazed by something ...
Whatever the emotion may be, you can use
that final exclamation mark. And then the last example
of where we would use an exclamation
mark would be with commands (also called
imperatives). If you say to somebody,
"fire at will!" you can hear that with that
strong sense of emotion you can use an
exclamation mark.
Now that we know what exclamation marks are for, we can
zoom in a little bit to some specific
rules. In the first case here what we
don't want to do is use too many
exclamation marks with sentences that
we're using in a formal or academic
context. In the first example,
clearly this is more colloquial speech,
and you could say "that was an awesome
dunk!" and the exclamation mark is perfectly fine. But in
the second example, if you are writing in
a formal context, then you don't want to
dress up your writing with unnecessary
exclamation marks because it's going to
seem sensationalistic, as if you're not
quite professional enough to write in
this context. Let the words speak for
themselves, and only in rare situations
will the exclamation mark be necessary or appropriate.
As mentioned we can use exclamation
marks with interjections as well, but
here too a little bit more nuance is
appropriate. In the first example here we
have what's called a mild interjection,
and because the expression is fairly
mild (not a really strong sense of
emotion) we don't need
an exclamation mark, whereas in the second example, [we have a]
stronger sense of emotion [and the] exclamation mark makes sense.
This is a bit of a judgment call though,
so if you were simply emailing somebody,
saying "Oops! sent you the wrong email. No problem,
let's move on ... then maybe it's a
mild expression. But if you really
screwed up, maybe you want to say "Sorry!" ...
you know, with an exclamation mark and change
the tone a little bit ...
It's up to you really what tone you're
trying to achieve with the exclamation mark. And so we
get to our last point of discussion,
which is how to integrate that exclamation mark with
other punctuation marks. In the first
place here, what we see is that we have
mistakenly added two final punctuation
marks, and the general rule of thumb is
that you don't want to double up
punctuation marks. So the period can
definitely go, but things get a little
bit more tricky if we end with quotation
marks. So let's pretend that this is
actually a quotation that we are using
here and the quotation originally had an
exclamation mark. Well, if we were to end right there we
would not add another period but if we
were to add a citation ...
so let's say this is from page six ... then
the final period is appropriate.
One other thing to think about is that
if there was no exclamation mark at the end ... so let's
say that the quotation ended with a
period, but you really want to add some
emphasis ... what you would do is not add the
exclamation mark here. That would be incorrect. What you
would do is you would just take
out the final punctuation, add the
citation, and then put the exclamation mark at the very
end to show that it's part of your
sentence and not part of the quotation.
The final rule to observe is that
in some cases we can break the rule
that we should not double up punctuation [marks].
So for instance if we have a title like
the movie Oklahoma! and it
already ends with an exclamation mark,
then in this case we could add the question mark for
our sentence afterwards.
same thing with the abbreviation in the
last example here. So the abbreviation is
a period, but we also want that exclamation mark in this
case for our
sentence as a whole. If you find this
awkward and indeed it does look a little
bit awkward, then just rephrase the whole
sentence so that you don't have this
problem.