Don’t Use Exclamation Points, Ethyl Cried!

We all talk. Some of us too much, but good writers understand cadence and pacing in dialogue and you can tell because the conversation is smooth and familiar. I’ve judged a number of contests over the years, and below you’ll find a couple of my pet peeves. One pet peeve I have is the idiom, pet peeve, so let’s move on.

“Jack, I think we need to take over this train! The engineer’s dead! If you don’t, we’ll crash into the some stalled train in front of us, or maybe the end of the line where there’s a lot of concrete and maybe a big steel thingy that will crush this tin can!”

“What makes you think I can stop this train, Ethyl?”

“I don’t know, Jack, but you’re a man and all men think they can fly airplanes, so why not a train!!!???”

“Of course I can, but Ethyl, why don’t you do it?” Jack asked without shouting like his partner.

Ethyl exclaimed. “Oh, Jack! My role is to stand aside while you fight the Bad Guys and look frightened! Maybe I can cover my mouth with one hand, too, while you decide between blue and red wires.”

“Good lord! Pay attention, Ethyl. Wires are only an issue when a bomb is about to go off,” he hissed.

“This train is a rolling bomb!”she shouted, fearfully, “but I’m beginning to think you’re a dud. Pretty soon people are going to think we hijacked this train –––.”

“Hi yourself, Ethyl, but this isn’t the time for pleasantries. As we race down this track they’ll soon call some alphabet group to stop us.”

“I’m confused, Jack.

“So am I, Ethyl, but at least we know who’s talking!”

I distilled this from an entry and changed enough of the story for you to get the idea. Writers should imitate the way people speak in real life.

For one thing, we don’t use a person’s name in every sentence when we’re talking. I think the original author watches too many movies or sitcoms, where scriptwriters repeat names to excess in order for the audience to keep up. It doesn’t work in print.

At the same time, , we don’t need tags and attributions like “hissed” in this sentence, because are no sibilants, and for crying out loud, avoid exclamation marks! And if you do use one, there’s no reason to explain that he or she exclaimed or shouted!!!

“One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke.” Either Mark Twain or F. Scott Fitzgerald said that, and there’s some question about which one, but it’s a true statement.

That’s something I’ve seen when I judged humor writing in newspapers many years ago. The exclamation point comes up way too often in the punch line, or as emphasis at the end of a story. One example is so bad it makes my teeth ache, but it was the last line in what I figured was supposed to be a joke…I think.

“And I looked up that day as the storm approached and saw a squirrel laying flat and holding onto the tree limb. I kept going, but gave him a word of advice. ‘Hold on tight, Mr. Bushytail, it’s a good thing you’re in a pecan tree, because this is gonna be nuts!’”

Maybe he read too much Swiss Family Robinson (1812) when he was younger! It looks like he caught some of Johann Wyss’ bad habits! This except from Wyss is a good bad example of what to avoid.

The setup. A ship sinks, the family survives and winds up on a beach to salvage what they could.

“Well done, Franz!” I cried; “these fishhooks, which you, the youngest, have found, may contribute more than anything else in the ship to save our lives by procuring food for us.”

“All these things are excellent indeed,” said I; “but my friend Jack here has presented me with a couple of huge, hungry, useless dogs who will eat more than any of us.”

“Oh, papa! They will be of use! Why, they will help us to hunt when we get on shore! (No tag here for some reason.)

“No doubt they will, if ever we do get on shore, Jack; but I must say I don’t know how it is to be done.”

Oh, look here, father!” cried Jack, drawing a little spyglass joyfully out of his pocket.

All right. I know this was written two hundred years ago, and the issues I’ve highlighted are more for tongue-in-cheek fun than anything else, but I’ve seen examples that are just as bad in contest entries, and the sad part is they’ve been published.

You can dissect and rewrite the scene above in a million different ways, but avoiding all those literary death traps of attributions, the overuse of the exclamation point, and for the love of god…semicolons, is step one.

So let’s review.

Don’t overuse names in dialogue.

Write dialogue as real people would speak.

No exclamation points!

Fewer tags (and I know this steps on toes). Instead, give your character something to do.

Cut as many adverbs as possible.

Learn to drive trains and diffuse bombs, just in case.

 

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About Reavis Wortham

NYT Bestselling Author and two-time Spur Award winner Reavis Z. Wortham pens the Texas Red River historical mystery series, and the high-octane Sonny Hawke contemporary western thrillers. His new Tucker Snow series begins in 2022. The Red River books are set in rural Northeast Texas in the 1960s. Kirkus Reviews listed his first novel in a Starred Review, The Rock Hole, as one of the “Top 12 Mysteries of 2011.” His Sonny Hawke series from Kensington Publishing features Texas Ranger Sonny Hawke and debuted in 2018 with Hawke’s Prey. Hawke’s War, the second in this series won the Spur Award from the Western Writers Association of America as the Best Mass Market Paperback of 2019. He also garnered a second Spur for Hawke’s Target in 2020. A frequent speaker at literary events across the country. Reavis also teaches seminars on mystery and thriller writing techniques at a wide variety of venues, from local libraries to writing conventions, to the Pat Conroy Literary Center in Beaufort, SC. He frequently speaks to smaller groups, encouraging future authors, and offers dozens of tips for them to avoid the writing pitfalls and hazards he has survived. His most popular talk is entitled, My Road to Publication, and Other Great Disasters. He has been a newspaper columnist and magazine writer since 1988, penning over 2,000 columns and articles, and has been the Humor Editor for Texas Fish and Game Magazine for the past 25 years. He and his wife, Shana, live in Northeast Texas. All his works are available at your favorite online bookstore or outlet, in all formats. Check out his website at www.reaviszwortham.com. “Burrows, Wortham’s outstanding sequel to The Rock Hole combines the gonzo sensibility of Joe R. Lansdale and the elegiac mood of To Kill a Mockingbird to strike just the right balance between childhood innocence and adult horror.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “The cinematic characters have substance and a pulse. They walk off the page and talk Texas.” —The Dallas Morning News On his most recent Red River novel, Laying Bones: “Captivating. Wortham adroitly balances richly nuanced human drama with two-fisted action, and displays a knack for the striking phrase (‘R.B. was the best drunk driver in the county, and I don’t believe he run off in here on his own’). This entry is sure to win the author new fans.” —Publishers Weekly “Well-drawn characters and clever blending of light and dark kept this reader thinking of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.” —Mystery Scene Magazine

7 thoughts on “Don’t Use Exclamation Points, Ethyl Cried!

  1. No argument from me on semicolons and adverbs, Rev.

    An exclamation point needs to be earned. For example, “Stop!” or “Fire!”

    I dislike long paragraphs of dialogue with no indication who’s speaking until an attribution is finally tacked on at the very end.

    Action tags instead of “s/he said” help the reader see what’s going on during dialogue. But I tend to overdo that.

    Thanks for the good reminders.

  2. Good tips, here, Rev!!!!!!! (#sorrynotsorry)

    🙂

    Especially this one: Learn to drive trains and diffuse bombs, just in case.

    I’ll get right on that.

  3. When I read Stephen King, I love to see how he punctuates his sentences. He once had a paragraph with all 15 common punctuation marks in it and it read a well. But then again he is a master wordsmith.

  4. A name in dialogue should only used at the beginning of the scene or in dialogue that is of great importance or emotion. “He’s dead, Jim.”

    I used to say that exclamation points make the scene sound like an entry in a teen girl’s diary, but, sadly, they now use emojis instead.

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