How to not write bad - Ben Yagoda 2013

Exclamation points, dashes, semicolons, colons, parentheses, italics, and rhetorical questions…
How to not write bad

…can all be effective if used correctly and in moderation. Common mistakes and misuses are addressed in Part II. The overuse issue is worth taking a couple of minutes with. When I was a magazine editor a few decades ago, I noticed that when some of the writers I worked with underlined or italicized a word for emphasis, sure as shooting, another underlined word or phrase would pop up within a couple of lines. And then another. I have continued to note this in published work, and have come to think of it as comparable to a phenomenon that occurs in concert halls: just as the sound of one person coughing makes other audience members powerless to resist the urge, so one use of italics can be contagious.

Sometimes the issue is less power of suggestion and more personal predilection. Tom Wolfe is enamored of exclamation points, John Irving of semicolons (examine his books and you’ll see what I mean), the New Yorker magazine of commas, and Ben Yagoda of parentheses. Emily Dickinson was quite fond of dashes. I don’t know about those other worthies, but quite a lot of my revising time is spent getting rid of parens (while still keeping enough of them for my writing to sound like me). If you’ve got a go-to typographical move, this is the strategy to follow.

A couple of pieces of punctuation are worth special mention. The first is exclamation points! Or, rather, the first is exclamation points. They’ve spread way beyond Tom Wolfe: if you’ve spent any time on e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter these days, you know that they are the punctuational coin of the realm. Sometimes, one isn’t enough, and you need two, three, or even four to show adequate enthusiasm. In fact, when I first got into texting with my twenty-two-year-old daughter, Maria, I was ending sentences with periods, as is my wont. She told me to use either exclamation points or nothing: the periods made it seem that I was being ironic or pointedly unenthusiastic. But what’s good for texting is bad for text. That is, stay away from exclamation points, except, as a matter of fact, when you’re being ironic or playful. Like this! Even then, use them sparingly.^*

And what of the rhetorical question? It’s definitely overused, often serving as nothing more than artificial throat clearing at the beginning of a paragraph. Instead, it usually works better to just dive right into what you want to say. The RQ can be a useful device, but it has to be deployed skillfully. As my first boss, Myron “Mike” Kolatch, the longtime editor of the New Leader magazine, used to say: “When you ask a question, answer it immediately”—the way I did at the beginning of this paragraph. That’s as opposed to something like:

[Is City Hall in compliance with new federal energy regulations? In 2007, Congress passed legislation requiring…]

No good: that question just lies there, unanswered, puzzling or bewildering the reader. First tell us about the regulations, then address the issue of whether or not City Hall is following them.