So what has the poor old exclamation mark done to deserve its banishment into obscurity?

As you can see, it’s still acceptable to use a question mark. A full stop is also acceptable. And if you were to start a sentence with “and” then that also seems to meet with the exacting standards set by agents and publishers. But if I’d done that at school, I’d have been marmalised for it. Because it means that you’re not really constructing sentences properly. And heaven forbid if you write a sentence that is more than twelve words long: that, and the use of colons and other such punctuation marks, is totally abhorrent in today’s writing.

I recently read a book called “Annihilation”. Well, I tried reading it, to be exact. I gave up about fifteen pages from the end because I just wasn’t enjoying it. The writing seemed so one-dimensional, despite the fact that the setting was dramatic and the action horrific in places.

In one scene the protagonist is walking back to base camp at night. She has seen two out of three of her companions die. Her body has been invaded by an alien entity. She is alone. She is scared by strange noises all around. She has little light to see by but, with what illumination she has, she sees a disembodied face staring up at her out of the ground.

Apparently, “Annihilation” has been made into a film. I haven’t seen it but I imagine that the director would ensure that the score would punctuate the appearance of the disembodied face with a musical exclamation to reflect the horror that it portrays. So why is there no exclamation mark in the text, either there or in other places where the action clearly demands it?

Seems like the exclamation mark has been well and truly killed off.

What a lot of tosh!