Grammar for the Soul by Lawrence A. Weinstein

Author:Lawrence A. Weinstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780835608657
Publisher: Quest Books
Published: 2008-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Trust

Exclamation Marks, Italics, Intensifiers

Many writers and grammarians inveigh against what I might call “typographical overkill,” meaning the extensive use of italics, intensifiers, and exclamation marks to emphasize one’s point. They see such devices as insults to a reader’s intelligence. Consider some alternative formulations of a famous sentiment attributed to Voltaire:

I may disagree with what you say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it! (exclamation mark)

I may disagree with what you say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it. (italics)

I may disagree with what you say, but I shall certainly, without question, defend to the death your right to say it. (intensifiers)

Writers who too frequently try to redouble emphasis by these means may well be better-intentioned than the boy who cried wolf, but they share his fate: their audience soon learns to discount their words generally and even comes to resent them. Of exclamation marks, Lewis Thomas writes, “Look! they say, look at what I just said! How amazing is my thought!” When he is subjected to these strident marks, he feels as if he’s “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.” (Thanks to Thomas, I am now seeing in the exclamation mark—in the mark itself, its very shape—an abnormally rigid six-year-old, arms pressed tight against her sides, standing on her head for all to marvel at.) “If,” writes Thomas, “a sentence really has something of importance to say, something quite remarkable, it doesn’t need a mark to point it out.”

A look at the Voltaire text undoctored seems to confirm the wisdom of Lewis’s comment.

I may disagree with what you say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it.

The claim being made is extreme, but I’m likelier to buy it if, in his mode of expression, the speaker does not shout or bully me. Sober and steady in his tone, letting his sentiment speak for itself, he inclines me to listen.

The issue involved here is a fundamental issue of community: trust. I have tried to cut down on red-lettering in my own writing, but that’s hard for me to do for the same reason that it’s hard for me to delegate responsibility: I lack trust in others to “get it right” without my supervision. Though I know quite well how badly I react to higher-ups and writers who boss me around, the task of building my faith in others—I include you, dear reader—remains a struggle for me, one that takes place largely on the page. (For my most recent setback in the struggle, you needn’t look far; it was the decision to italicize the first “me” in the preceding sentence.)

I’ve made progress, though. A case in point: In the introduction to this book you may recall having read this sentence:

I wish to suggest that our list of activities capable of hastening personal growth be expanded beyond yoga, meditation, and the martial arts to include a wise use of syntax and punctuation.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.