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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/31308
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/31308
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

On the old typewriters, there was no `!` key. To create an exclamation mark you had to type a single quote, backspace, and type a period. That was a good system. Exclamation marks should be hard to type. There is a good argument to be made for breaking them off your keyboard altogether.

There is a longstanding debate about whether or not writing is recorded speech. Speech came before writing, so it is reasonable to ask if writing is just writing down speech, and should therefore try to capture not only the spoken words, but the tone in which they are spoken.

To shortcut this debate, record some literal speech and make a literal transcript. If this does not convince you that writing is not recorded speech, nothing will.

So, writing is not recorded speech and you should not try to use punctuation to indicate tone of voice in writing. If you want to convey tone in writing, you do it by the tone of the writing itself, not by imitating the tones of speech.

Speech and writing are different media, just as movies and novels are different media. The operate differently and achieve their effects in different ways. Nor are their effects equivalent. There are things you can achieve in a novel that you cannot achieve in a movie, and vice versa; and there are things you can achieve in writing that you cannot achieve in speech, and vice versa.

This is as much true, indeed, probably nowhere more true, than when you are creating putatively spoken dialogue in a work of fiction. The first rule of dialogue is that dialogue is not speech. It is a specific literary form with its own rules and conventions. It is not how people actually talk. Writing down how people actually talk would be both tedious and confusing. Good written dialogue achieves it effectiveness and its convincing character from what they characters say, not how they say it.

Original score: 2