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What is an Exclamation Mark?
An exclamation mark, exclamation point or bang, “!”,
is usually used after an interjection or exclamation to indicate strong feeling. An exclamation
mark is a punctuation mark, and like the full stop (or period), it marks the end of a sentence. A
sentence ending in an exclamation mark is either an actual exclamation (“Wow!”), a command
(“Stop!”), or is intended to be astonishing in some way (“They were the footprints
of a gigantic hound!”).
In typesetting or printing (and therefore when spelling text out orally), the exclamation mark is
called a screamer or bang.
In typewritten texts and other documents printed in uniform-width fonts, there is a
convention among lay writers that two spaces are placed after the full stop (along with
the other sentence enders: question mark and exclamation mark), as opposed to the
single space used after: commas and
semicolons.
In modern American English typographical usage, debate has arisen around the proper number
of trailing spaces after a full stop to separate sentences within a paragraph. Whereas two
spaces are still regarded by many outside the publishing industry to be the better usage
for monospace typefaces, the awkwardness that most keyboards and word-processing software
have in representing correctly the 1.5 spaces that had previously become standard for
typographically proportional (non-monospace) fonts has led to some confusion about how
to render the space between sentences using only word-processing tools. Many descriptivists
support the notion that a single space after a full stop should be considered standard
because it has been the norm in mainstream publishing for many decades. Many prescriptivists,
meanwhile, adhere to the earlier use of two spaces on typewriters to make the separation
of sentences more salient than separation of elements within sentences. Some, however,
accept that in modern word-processing the single space is better because two spaces may
stretch inordinately when full justification is applied. Additionally, many computer
typefaces are designed proportionately to alleviate the need for the double space.
Most modern typesetters, designers, and desktop publishers use only one space after
a period as do all mainstream publishers of books and journals.
With the advent of standardized HTML for rendering web pages, the broader distinction
between full stop spacing and internal spacing in a sentence has become largely moot
on the World Wide Web. Standardized HTML treats additional white space after the first
space as immaterial, and ignores it when rendering the page. A common workaround for
this is the use of (Non-breaking space) to represent extra spaces,
and is done automatically by some WYSIWYG editors.
Copyright © 2005-2010 Exclamation-Mark.com.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2
or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation;
with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.
A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU
Free Documentation License”.
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