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38.2 Use and Abuse of the Exclamation Point
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In a famous essay on punctuation, Lewis Thomas takes on the exclamation point:
Exclamation points are the most irritating of all! Look! they say, look at what I just said! How amazing is my thought! It is like being forced to watch someone else's small child jumping up and down crazily in the center of the living room shouting to attract attention. If a sentence really has something of importance to say, something quite remarkable, it doesn't need a mark to point it out. And if it is really, after all, a banal sentence needing more zing, the exclamation point simply emphasizes its banality!
—Lewis Thomas, "Notes on Punctuation"
Tom Wolfe, on the other hand, makes abundant stylistic use of exclamation points in The Right Stuff. Wolfe writes as a creative journalist, not an academic, and his narrative voice evokes the supercharged egos of rocket test pilots from the 1960s. "Look at me!" is just what a rocket pilot would say:
Yeager and the rocket pilots who soon joined him at Muroc [Air Base] had a hard time dealing with publicity. [...] The real problem was the reporters violated the invisible walls of the fraternity. They blurted out questions and spoke boorish words about...all the unspoken things!—about fear and bravery (they would say the words!) and how you felt at such and such a moment! It was obscene!
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