In the newsroom where I began my writing career nearly four decades ago, a vintage front page hung on the wall. The old newspaper carried the story of the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, its banner headline set off by an exclamation point.
That bold punctuation, which greeted me each morning as I walked to my desk, was meant as the exception rather than the rule in the work I was assigned to do. Journalists, I was reminded, should keep calm, especially when the world hummed with portent. Reporters and editors embodied that restraint by scrupulously avoiding exclamation points, which were seen as the grammatical equivalent of raising your voice.
In some 33 years at a daily newspaper, I think the only time I ever exclaimed on the page was when I quoted from a Dr. Seuss book. Exclamation points shimmer from the stories of that famed children’s writer like party balloons, giving masterpieces such as “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” and “Horton Hears a Who!” an irresistibly fizzy air.
Why We Wrote This
Our writer long avoided exclamation points. Then, the pandemic hit and the lively punctuation became a signal flare in a cold, gray sea. Now he loves their zing! Their fizz! Their pop!
All well and good for kids, I assumed, but we grown-ups were supposed to keep our heads about us. Which is why, throughout my long tenure as a journalist, my colleagues and I almost never dotted sentences with anything flashier than a semicolon.
But things changed for me five years ago when I took a job editing the magazine of a national nonprofit. When my new boss welcomed me aboard with an email proclaiming “I’m glad you’re here!,” it felt as if a festive firecracker had exploded in my inbox. Maybe, I thought to myself, the hurly-burly of onboarding a new hire had temporarily gotten her carried away.
The exclamations continued, though, with everyone else on my new team peppering their prose with similar jolts of electricity.
“Great job!,” a fellow employee messaged after I’d finished a routine project. “Cookies are in the break room!” a member of the accounting staff announced in a group text.
Each day, whether it was “Thank you!” or “No problem!” or “Happy Friday!,” I came to suspect, as I opened my laptop, that I was now dwelling within a colony of cheerleaders.
If thoughts of high school pep squads came to mind, it’s perhaps because I’d come to see exclamation points as a fixture of youth culture – the bright early feathers of minds not yet aware of life’s sharp edges.
But that surely didn’t seem to be the case with the folks in my new workplace. Mostly women, they were raising children, nurturing marriages, caring for older parents, confronting the usual ups and downs of families and careers.
Those exclamation points in their daily messages, I came to understand, embraced enthusiasm as a sustaining strength. It was their way of urging me and others up each day’s hill, nudging us toward the summit so that, at the close of our shift, we might be able to remember the climb and enjoy the view.
All of this became much clearer to me two months after I began my new job, when the COVID-19 pandemic closed our workplace. Working remotely placed a higher premium on written messages, and seeing those exclamation points in office memos during the strange days of the lockdowns was like scanning a signal flare in a cold, gray sea.
Their sense of encouragement, which I’d once been tempted to dismiss with an eye roll as over-the-top, became a lifeline. I can still remember sitting in my newly improvised home office during the pandemic and reading the latest virtual pats on the back: “Excellent PowerPoint!” “Hang in there!” “This will work!”
What grew from those texts and emails, I now know, was a sense of shared purpose and a motivation to keep going. These co-workers, though new to me, had my back. Their passion radiated from their words – and their lively punctuation.
