The Exclamation Point Is Not Your Friend

It's not a rare occurence that I get essays which end like this!!! They seem to equate enthusiasm with punctuation! Thus the proliferation of exclamation points!!!! Especially now that there's a huge rush to make it to the deadline and they're all high strung and worried about documentation!!! And alas!!!! They frequently forget to put page numbers!!!!

Even if you bombard them with lessons on the proper use of punctuation marks, with words from Stephen King and Strunk and White and even good old Kate Turabian, they still love their exclamation points!!!! Their papers look like mid-50s American musicals, like say Oklahoma! and Oh Jackie Oh God No!!!! So in a last ditch effort to free myself from exclamation happy essays, I'm putting across Elmore Leonard's ten rules on writing, hoping that it would work miracles!!!!

I swear to wage a personal war against exclamation points!!!!

[ exclamation happy version, cross post from missives from the teacher, ]