Having been given the task of reviewing the first draft of a friend’s manuscript over the holiday break I was struck by two things. Firstly, the story was quite well written in terms of its content. The second, that it was almost unreadable due to the excessive use of exclamation marks – almost at the end of every sentence – and the complete lack of any attempt (or maybe understanding about) what a paragraph is and how to construct it.

This story was not a Hunter S. Thompson stream of consciousness style of work and needed even the most rudimentary element of the written story, paragraphs.

Given that I was half way through reading Lynne Truss’ book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves. The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, I thought I’d skip ahead and see what she had to say about the exclamation mark. Apart from quoting Chekhof she notes that, “it comes at the end of a sentence, is unignorable and hopelessly heavy-handed”. F. Scott Fitzgerald said it was like laughing at your own joke, whereas H. F Fowler said that it “indicates a writer who wants to add a spurious dash of sensation to something unsensational.”

Ah ha! I thought. I am not the only one who finds the exclamation mark annoying and downright distracting, and I totally agree with Lynn Truss’s description of it “being like the big attention deficit brother who gets over-excited and breaks things and laughs too loudly”.

Now I’ve got that out of my system, it does raise the more pervasive issue of the lack of formal training in punctuation these days – even in my days at school in the 1970s we weren’t taught punctuation – it was something you absorbed by some kind of osmosis though getting your corrected essays back.

As a writer, and as someone who regularly reviews drafts of manuscripts, I am appalled at the lack of good punctuation and sentence structure. Computer spell-checkers and format checkers are simply not good enough and miss more than they identify. There is no substitute for the writer other than to take the time to write, spell, punctuate and format their work as best they can. Handing it over to an editor in a sloppy state is not acceptable in my book and shows a laziness and arrogance towards writing. If you want to write something, take pride in what you write, even at the early stages.

Now to the panda. A panda walks into a café. He orders and sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

“Why?” asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

“I’m a panda,” he says, at the door. “Look it up.”

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

“Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like animal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

Thanks Lynn Truss for sharing this joke and for your passion for punctuation. I can start 2014 in the knowledge that my crusade to eradicate the excessive use of exclamation marks has started in earnest. I informed my friend that his manuscript was a good read, but that he should locate the ‘search and replace’ function on his computer and replace EVERY exclamation mark with the simple, yet effective full stop, all 789 of them.