Persons attempting to find a "text" in this [story] will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a "subtext" in it will be banished; persons attempting to explain, interpret, explicate, analyze, deconstruct, or otherwise "understand" it will be exiled to a desert island in the company only of other explainers.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR - Wendell Berry's introduction to Jayber Crow.
This article was posted to Jayber on 24 July 2006 by to the following categories: Feature, Stories.
An audio version of this article is also available.
Flagrant notational violence of the exclamatory--dare I say inflammatory--variety is rampant and must be extinguished before it does further harm. Ladies and gentlemen, grammarians and countrymen, it's time to raise public awareness of the overuse of exclamation marks. Allow me to introduce a new tool: the Exclamation Ratio (r).
The Exclamation Ratio (r) of a group of sentences is the ratio of sentences ending in exclamation marks to sentences not ending in exclamation marks and is formally defined as follows:
r = s / ( t - s )
Where:
t = Total number of sentences. 1
s = Number of sentences ending in exclamation marks. 2
After calculating the Exclamation Ratio (r) for a given set of sentences, the results may be interpreted in the following way:
I consistently receive emails that have a multitude of exclamation marks in near as many sentences. This has grown to be more than a minor annoyance and until now it's been unclear to me how to deal with this epidemic which is spreading faster than anyone had previously imagined. Some of the emails I've received recently have had Exclamation Ratios (r) of 5.00 or higher--off the charts!
The new breed of email demands a verdict. What say you? It's time for the typographic unification of our punctual selves. Who's with me? Do you not remember when these egregious vulgarities were once thought to be merely fictional impossibilities? Regrettably, Truman, they are no longer; welcome to this cruel place we call life where glaring crimes are being garishly committed not only without repercussions, but without remorse.
Hear me please. Is anyone listening?
Hey,
I’ve missed reading your writing… (sorry, couldn’t help myself)
Amen brother (son). I shudder to imagine what the formula would do if the sentence has all caps and has an exclamation point or two?
Bang !
You are so funny. I am guilty of the unrequired overuse of such exclamation marks. The first step IS admitting you have a problem.
Well, the general rule is this: the more exclamation points there are, the more delusional the author. I’ve kept this in mind when reading all e-mails, chain-letters, essays, and political screeds, and I’ve found it to be a quite reliable axiom.