ShmoopTube

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Here’s your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by the Kitamura FCM-8006W.

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Which won the award for most unimaginative name for a fortune cookie machine in 1981 and 1982.

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The writer is considering changing the exclamation

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mark in the previous sentence to a period. Should the writer make this change?

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And here are the potential answers...

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The author is right to be wary of the exclamation mark.

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Exclamation marks should only be used if we have something astounding to say;

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they should be reserved for when we want to put some extra oomph behind a sentence.

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Overuse maxes out the volume on every sentence, making it impossible to emphasize the thing

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we really want people to hear.

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With that in mind, let’s go through the answer options to see if we can find a reason

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to get rid of the exclamation mark in this question.

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Option B.

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Option (B) isn’t a good reason to nix an exclamation mark; they have nothing to do

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with whether a sentence is closely related to the topic at hand.

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We want to cut things that are irrelevant, right?

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Why would we want to broadcast them to the world?

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Choice (A) give us no valid reason to cut the exclamation mark either. It doesn’t

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matter if one has been previously used in the passage.

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As we said before, exclamation marks do their jobs best when there aren’t many of them.

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They’re a tool to help a writer make a particular sentence stand out from the crowd.

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We’re gonna say no to choice (D) as well.

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The language in the passage is far from academic or dense.

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In fact, it’s pretty casual and easy-going.

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Anyway, if we were trying to write something super academic, we wouldn’t want to throw

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in an exclamation mark simply to lighten things up.

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It would feel random, and then people would see through how smart we were trying to sound.

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(C) is the right answer because it correctly identifies the tone of the passage and the

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role of the sentence within it.

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This passage is informal, so it can totally get away with an exclamation mark.

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After all, 8,000 cookies is a lot for one machine to make in an hour!

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Did you hear that exclamation mark we just used?

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Boom.

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