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Title - Writing and Grammar Unit - Lesson 10
By - John Foley
Primary Subject - Language Arts
Grade Level - 9-12
Unit Contents:
Lesson 10: Interjections and Exclamation Points
The interjection is the Pluto of parts, out on the perimeter and seldom cause for concern. An interjection communicates strong emotion or surprise. Punctuation – sometimes a comma, more often an exclamation point – is used to set off an interjection from the rest of the sentence.Examples:
Oh, no! The cat puked.
Nuts, I thought I was going to win that hand.
Wow! What a shot!
Overusing interjections will annoy the reader. Some students are overly fond of the accompanying exclamation point as well, which they use in clusters of two or three to convey excitement. Make your writing exciting with nouns and verbs and you won’t have to overcompensate by using excessive interjections and multiple exclamation points.
Naturally, there are exceptions to this and every generalization about writing. The author Tom Wolfe, for example, has made interjections and exclamation points essential elements of his style. Read the following excerpt about a man sweating profusely during a bankruptcy proceeding from his bestseller A Man in Full:
Croker stared at the upright middle finger and squinted and stared some more, and his face grew red. And then Peepgass saw them . . . the saddlebags! The saddlebags! The saddlebags had formed! They were complete! The great stains of sweat on the tycoon’s shirt had now spread from both sides, from under the arms and across the rib cage and beneath the curves of his mighty chest until they had met, come together, hooked up – two dark expanses joined at the sternum. They looked just like a pair of saddlebags on a horse. . . . Oh, Peepgass loved it! Harry had done it again! – gotten his saddlebags – even with a tough old bird like Charlie Croker!
How many exclamation points are in this paragraph? How many interjections? Are they effective? Would the paragraph be as strong without them? Reflect.
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