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The dog barked at the postie!!!!!

See what I did there?  I took a perfectly ordinary, unremarkable sentence and made it really exciting by adding a row of exclamation marks.

Well, maybe not really exciting.  In fact, not even a little bit exciting.  Dogs bark at posties every day.  And the addition of a row of exclamation marks doesn’t change that.

Until about 35 years ago, typewriters – the forerunners to computer keyboards, for those who weren’t around in those days – didn’t have a separate key for the exclamation mark.  If you wanted to type an exclamation mark, you had to first type a full stop (or a period, if you were in North America), carefully backspace, and then type an apostrophe above it.  Frankly, it was all a bit of a palaver.  And I’m sure that it encouraged writers to think a little more carefully about whether the exclamation mark was really necessary.  Was it really going to add anything to the communication?  Or was it just going to be a slightly distracting ornament at the end of the sentence?

These days, of course, adding an exclamation mark – or five – is as easy as slipping in a capital letter.  And, yes, there are times when an exclamation mark can be useful.  But, most of the time, it still doesn’t add anything useful to the communication.  Most of the time it just gets in the way.

Fowler’s Modern English Usage suggests that ‘excessive use of exclamation marks in expository prose is a certain indication of an unpractised writer or one who wants to add a spurious dash of sensation to something unsensational.’

Among editors of a certain age, exclamation marks are sometimes known as screamers.  I remember one editor who, whenever he received a piece of copy with exclamation marks used ill-advisedly, would return the copy to the writer with a hand-written note saying: ‘I will be happy to consider this piece when you stop screaming at me.’

A not-unreasonable offer.

When I first started writing professionally, I wrote with a ballpoint pen on an unlined octavo-sized newsprint pad.  My scribbled pages were then sent to Janice, who processed them on her Imperial typewriter before sending them on to the copy chief.

A year or so later, my boss turned up at my desk one day and asked if I could type.

‘No.  Not really,’ I told him.

‘Oh well, I’m sure you’ll figure it out,’ he said.  And he plonked a seriously-second-hand Olivetti Lettera 22 portable typewriter on the desk in front of me.  That afternoon, I typed my own copy for the very first time.

A few years on, and the over-worked Olivetti 22 was replaced with a brand new Olivetti 32 – although often my copy was still retyped by one of the secretaries – usually on an IBM Selectric machine – before heading to its final destination.

And then everything changed.  As a result of a series of complicated (and unlikely) events, I acquired a ‘portable’ PC.  It operated off two 5½ inch disks (one for the application, one for the data), and it weighed about the same as a small car.  But it did enable me to render words in both bold and italic faces.  And it did offer a selection of about ten different fonts.

Among those of us who grew up with the constraints of a traditional typewriter, the new choices meant that we could now choose a serif face or a sans-serif face.  And – just occasionally – we might even choose a serif face for the bulk of the document and a sans-serif face for a small passage that we wished to highlight or otherwise set aside from the words around it.

But not everyone began life with the limited choices of a Lettera 32.  Today, there are many many writers who have always had the choice of 50 or 100 or even 1,000 fonts.  And, unfortunately, more than a few of these writers seem to think that using a dozen or so different fonts in the same document will make their writing more interesting.  It won’t.  And it doesn’t.  It just makes it harder for the reader to read.

Clever art directors and skilled typographers can sometimes get away with mixing several fonts.  Writers seldom can.  For clarity and ease of communication, it is almost always best to restrict and restrain.

Yes, it is now easy to render every paragraph – even every sentence – in a different font.  But, just because you can, it doesn’t mean you should.

About once a week, the news media runs a story about how some fundamental aspect of life as we know it is about to change.  Typically, the headlines lead us to believe that within a very short time – perhaps the next year or so – we will all be doing X.  Or Y.  Or possibly Z.

For the sensation-seeking media it is fortunate that readers and viewers have short memories.  A couple of years down the road, not one in a hundred of these predictions will have come to pass.

As a young writer, I used to write copy for a leading clothing brand.  Twice a year, an art director and I would spend a day or two at the clothier’s trade showrooms.  There we would be introduced to the next big thing in pants and shirts and sweaters and jackets.

As part of our visit, we used to get a briefing from each of the divisional merchandise directors.  These guys were gods.  They spent half of their time travelling around the world, attending trade shows and such.  The other half they spent wining and dining people from the major retail groups.  If anyone knew what we were all going to be wearing in 12 months’ time, it was these guys.

And they did often get it right.  But they also got it wrong from time to time.

At one of the semi-annual briefings we were assured that, the following winter, everyone would be wearing a rather murky brown colour called gunstock.  Hardly anyone did.

On another occasion, we were assured that men were about to flock to business shirts with three-quarter length sleeves.  Few (if any) did.

But the really earth-shattering revelation occurred when the divisional merchandise director in charge of men’s pants announced that jeans were dead.  ‘You – and millions of others – have purchased your last pair of jeans,’ he said.

Jeans – both fashion jeans and everyday jeans – had been a big part of the company’s business for many years.  But in the following season’s range there would not be a single pair.  It was a pity.  In the year that jeans were predicted to die, men and women bought more jeans than ever before.  (But not our client’s jeans of course.)

As Mark Twain once noted: ‘The art of prophecy is very difficult – especially with respect to the future’.  But can it be that hard for editors to occasionally ask themselves: Does this ‘forecast’ change seem even remotely likely?

By some stroke of fortune, a group of us – some not known for their time keeping – managed to arrive at the restaurant at pretty much the same time.

‘Ah, yes.  Table for ten,’ the maître d’ said and, after gathering up a small stack of menus, led us to our table.

Purely by chance, I was leading the pack.  And, as we made our way across the restaurant, the maître d’ nodded – very discreetly – in the direction of a table in one corner of the room and whispered: ‘Amanda Nash’.

I’m afraid I had absolutely no idea who Amanda Nash was.  But she was clearly someone important.  Or famous.  Or possibly both.

As we perused the menus, I mentioned – again, very discreetly – to the woman on my left that Amanda Nash was at the corner table.

‘And who’s Amanda Nash?’ my companion asked.

I told her that I had no idea, but I assumed that she must be someone important or famous or possibly both.

A series of enquiries went around the table and the enquiry chain was almost back to me when one of my fellow diners said: ‘Isn’t she the presenter of one of those house hunting programmes on TV?’  But, as someone else pointed out, that was Amanda Lamb.

And so it seemed that none of us had any idea who Amanda Nash was.  And this led to a general discussion about all of the other ‘celebrities’ of whom we had vaguely heard or read about and yet knew nothing about the reason for their celebrity status.  ‘Just celebrated for being a celebrity, I suppose,’ the woman on my right said resignedly.

Going on for 100 years ago, G K Chesterton suggested that ‘journalism largely consists of saying “Lord Jones is Dead” to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive’.  We might expect things to have changed in the course of 80 or 90 years.  But have they?  It seems to me that a good deal of modern journalism consists of telling us – in all the gory detail that can be dug up (or made up?) – all about the goings on of people of whom most of us have never heard, people who are, in my dining companion’s words, celebrated for being a celebrity.