Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Lake
Well, she wasn't talking about the stuff in the middle of the sentence like commas, colons, etc. Just the stuff at the end. The only "in the middle" stuff she disapproved of was anything that added bang to it, like italics. She saw narration as just flat text. IE, sorta like, "Tom went to town, saw a cat and bought a soda." But she disapproved of things like "Tom got run over!?" or "Not on my watch!"
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Both of those sentences sound like dialogue to me.
It depends on the narrator and the intended style and effect. Guidelines (because there are few rules, in this area) will vary depending on whether you're writing a children's picture book, a first-person YA adventure, a third-person literary novel, or etc.
I will, however, vigorously disgree with the implication that narration without exclamation points is inherently boring. That's down to the quality of the writing and the skill of the writer. If your writing is boring without exclamation points, it will be just as boring with them (though possibly a little more irritating).