You know, the "theatre"

As a playwright, and as a human being, I find punctuation very important. So important I will blog about it. So now I want to talk to you a little bit about exclamation points and quotation marks.


I love the exclamation point, but me and ! broke up after college when I worked as a reporter at a small town paper. We would get a lot of press releases from people who used our friend the exclamation point very liberally. If your press release is about a festival that celebrates turtles, you should not have any exclamation points in it. I began to see the exclamation point not as reflections of joy, but as superficial monikers cheaply attached to banality.

It was not until I discovered Dinosaur Comics that I once again recognized the exclamation point as amazing. Thanks, creator of Dinosaur Comics! I put your link on my list of links!

So, as a point of instruction, DO NOT use exclamation points if there is a town council or community even involved. DO use them if there are pictures of dinosaurs. Also, in instances of clever town mottos.

Quotation marks seem pretty easy: they quote something said or written. That's it. I don't know how it got around that you can use them when writing some kind of "slang" or "jargon." That just makes you sound unhip. And you should instead try to be hip.

Then there's this usage on Craigslist, in a post from this awesome dress-up group:

"Do you enjoy period clothing of various era (1920's, 30's 40's, etc), or maybe you enjoy the Victorian sort of lifestyle of "Teas", fancy clothing, men in top-hat and tails, etc.? Did you always enjoy "theatre" in school and have been looking for a classy outlet for your creativity?"

Why capitalize and quotate "Teas"? And by simply putting quotations around "theatre," the whole sentence reads like it's from a pamphlet called "Warning Signs Your Son Is Gay". ("Does your son enjoy 'theatre'?")



All I'm saying is, you can't use quotation marks or exclamation points willy-nilly. You CAN use quotation fingers in conversation pretty much all the time. That is hilarious.