The DfE has issued guidance on exclamation marks. How Orwellian is that!

A friend of mine, another journalist, is getting terrifically worked up about the Department for Education’s persecution of exclamation marks. He’s busy writing a defence of free punctuation and because he’s a better stylist than the people laying down the law on this one, this will sting. Apparently, exam bureaucrats told teachers and moderators at a briefing run by the Standards Testing Agency last month that the use of an ‘exclamation sentence’ must start with either a ‘how’ or ‘what’ and must be a full sentence – including a verb. So, ‘What a delightful home yours is!’ is fine; ‘Awesome!’ is not.

Naturally, there’s going to be a backlash. It started in that fine periodical, Schools Week a fortnight ago, and this week takes to the Sunday Times and from there it moves to the rest of the media. And like all the best fights, there’s a cultural and political component to it.