I’ve noticed myself doing it more and more lately, and I’m going to try and stop. They say the first step to stop and addiction is to admit it. So here goes.
I’m addicted to using exclamation marks and ellipsis where I shouldn’t.
Phew! That feels SO much better! Aw damn, I’m already doing it again. I was pondering over why I keep abusing these two simple punctuation marks, and I think it’s quite simple: often it’s to do with timing, and finding a simple way to convey an emotion in something written.
When I talk to somebody, I can pause for effect, and emote with my voice, but it’s so much harder to do that in text. It’s all too easy for a reader to skip over something and see the punchline to a joke before you want them to. The end result is that they don’t laugh or feel the same emotion that you were trying to originally express to them.
So as a result, I’ve taken to peppering my forum posts, emails, blog posts, and anything else I write – apart from the formal stuff, obviously – with exclamation marks and ellipsis. I over-use the parenthesis sometimes too. I’d written an email recently, which when I read it over I realised I’d pretty much overlapped entire sentences by using parenthesis.
Maybe it would be a good idea for me to re-read Eats, shoots & leaves?