Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Lake
To everyone else, as far as my use of extra sentence punctuation, I typically don't ever use shock points (ie, !?) in anything but dialog. However, I do occasionally like to use ! and itallics to add a little bit of bang to the narration, but nothing exhaustive. For me it'd usually be something like this:
"Then Tom and his gang turned the corner and ran into a bear! Now that was definitely something new!!"
I typically only ever use it when I want to add a bit more punch and emotion to the scene. But her belief was that you should never use anything but period and question mark to end a sentence, and God forbid you should ever consider using italics on anything that was narration as those should be reserved only for dialog. As I said above, I tend to disagree and it sounds like most of the rest of you do too. In fact, I was kinda surprised at her statement as my college creative writing teacher never nicked me for doing that, nor have any of my reviewers.
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Double punctuation is both unnecessary and distracting. Three exclamation points in your example is three too many, unless you're writing a comic book. Italicizing
that doesn't offend my editorial sensibilities, unless you were to italicize frequently. Punctuation and typography aren't supposed to call attention to themselves; they support the message.
Perhaps your teacher cared more about creativity than punctuation. That doesn't mean it's okay to scatter exclamation points everywhere.