Tip Tuesday — Exclamation!!!!!!! Points!!!!!!!

Whoooohooooo!!!!!! Exclamation marks ROCK!!!!!! They make everything super exciting!!!!!! And important!!!!!!! Right?!?!?!?

Unless you over use them. Then your character/narrator just sound like they’re all hopped up on pixie sticks.

Don’t get me wrong, I love me some exclamation marks. But they should be used sparingly. And one at a time. And not in conjunction with question marks. Yes, I have a lot of rules around exclamation marks. But trust me, it’s all for the good of your book.

You want to use exclamation marks sparingly, unless they actually are part of a character’s speech pattern. Overuse can actually lessen their impact and readers will get to the point where they see them and just shrug. They get desensitized to them. So you want to make sure that you get as much impact out of the use of exclamation marks as possible.

After all, if you end every sentence with an exclamation point, how will readers know when to get super excited about something?