'Give us a break!' Anger over exclamation mark crackdown

A backlash is growing over new rules for primary school grammar tests that limit the use of exclamation marks.

Teachers "are up in arms" over guidance they claim is old-fashioned and inaccurate, says the Sunday Times.

Under the new rules, set down by the Department of Education, pupils in key stages one and two will lose marks in national curriculum tests for using an exclamation mark if the sentence does not begin with "how" or "what".

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

"A sentence that ends in an exclamation mark, but which does not have one of the grammatical patterns shown above, is not considered to be creditworthy as an exclamation," say the guidelines.

However, education experts warn the move could put children off from writing creatively.

"Donnez-moi a break!" says Professor John Sutherland, the author of How Good Is Your Grammar?.

"It is nonsense of the highest degree," he told the Sunday Times. "I am not surprised teachers wearily sigh when these instructions come down from Whitehall."

Prof Sutherland and others on social media have been quick to point out that the punctuation tool is used liberally by many in Westminster, with the academic saying: "'Cripes! Yikes!' Boris Johnson lives by exclamation marks. If you ruled them out, poor old Boris would be deflated like a collapsed balloon."

The Independent also takes aim at the government, arguing that "orders, imprecations, pleas for mercy, none of these work half so well without the magic intensifier".

However, The Spectator's Melanie McDonagh makes a broader point about class and language.

"It's rather an indicator of privilege that you can afford to play fast and loose with language. You can make free with syntax and punctuation if you know what you're doing," she says.

"For the less sure-footed – and it's often a class thing – you cling to the rules because the usage around you isn't any guide to what's acceptable."

Nevertheless, she concludes the rule on exclamation marks "is nuts".