An Admirable Point: A Brief History of the Exclamation Mark!

Description

Few punctuation marks elicit quite as much love or hate as the exclamation mark. It's bubbly and exuberant, an emotional amplifier whose flamboyantly dramatic gesture lets the reader know: here be feelings! Scott Fitzgerald famously stated exclamation marks are like laughing at your own joke; Terry Pratchett had a character say that multiple !!! are a 'sure sign of a diseased mind'. So what's the deal with ! ? An Admirable Point recuperates the exclamation mark from its much maligned place at the bottom of the punctuation hierarchy. It explores how ! came about in the first place some six hundred years ago, and uncovers the many ways in which ! has left its mark on art, literature, (pop) culture, and just about any sphere of human activity - from Beowulf to spam emails, ee cummings to neuroscience. Whether you think it's over-used, or enthusiastically sprinkle your writing with it, ! is inescapable.

Florence Hazrat is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Sheffield, studying the bracket in early modern literature. She received her PhD from the University of St Andrews, where she researched refrains in the sixteenth century. She is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker, a folk fiddler, and the host of a podcast about dots and dashes.

Enjoyably mischievous ... an invitation to shrug off the prescriptions of the language police and reawaken a sense of wonder * Times Literary Supplement * Fascinating ... carries a punch * The Week * In 150-odd pages, Hazrat examines the [exclamation] mark's origins in the Middle Ages, its journeys in and out of literary fashion, its use in Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Gerard Manley Hopkins, its career in advertising and comics and its apotheosis in the social media age with Donald Trump's screamer showers on Twitter * The Times *