coming over all Lynne Truss - ooer

I'm a secondary English teacher and this year have been correcting schoolwork rather than teaching it. Among the multitudes of grammatical and stylistic errors the youth of Eire today delight in, is a tendency, especially among teenage girls, to overuse the exclamation mark.

So, an essay that should be entitles 'A Personal response to the poetry of Sylvia Plath' becomes 'A Personal Response to the Poetry of Sylvia Plath!!'

Or what should be a college going boy's diary entry reads as

'Dear Diary! You won't believe the day I've had!!?? I can't handle my parents any more, I 'm going to kill them!! My dad, is like, such a loser!!!'

Hardened criminals, learned professors, they're all morphed into teen valley girls, or worse still, the exclamation marks crop up in the middle of supposedly academic essays, completely ruining the tone. Are they all on coke? Do they think that much enthusiasm is endearing??"!! Don't they realise it just makes them sound hyper, silly and a little bit crazy?!!!

Oh, I do like to rant about how the youth of today are losing the plot in terms of literacy, but that was not actually the purpose of my post - no - this fear of exclamation mark overuse was actually my glossing over my last couple wondering if I too, might possibly suffer from the same disease? Am I also abusing the exclamation mark? I hope I haven't used a double, or god forbid triple series of them, but they're in there alright. Does this mean my inner bubbly teenager is actually still in there? What should I do with her?

Right, make her babysit....