Midwest Memo
Exclamation point?
by Alan Shultz

No one has ever complimented me on my use of grammar. And proper punctuation can leave me staring at a word processor straight on until the screen saver goes dark.

I am not one who should throw stones.

Having said that, I greeted one Comet website headline last week with both dismay and disheartenment.

"Guilty as charged!" the headline blared, as I searched the column inches for any cause for exclamation in the article reporting the jury verdict in the Rebecca Lohmiller criminal trial.

I've been a devoted fan of the exclamation point ever since I heard one fellow's take on the excitable punctuation mark. The speaker was Larry Winget, a business speaker and author. Winget told us that if he had to go through life as a punctuation mark he wanted to be an exclamation point.

"I want that energy, that wow quality it has," he said describing the lankly line that hovers over the perfectly round period.

According to Wikipedia, the free, on-line encyclopedia, the exclamation point is used to indicate "strong feeling" or "high volume" or "identify something astonishing in some way."

I object, I reject the exclamation mark tossed at me last week on our website.

The news report of a guilty verdict clearly doesn't allow for "feeling," based on the rules of journalism. I guess an argument could be made for selling papers by cranking up the "volume" on something perceived as sensational. That's hardly the tradition of this newspaper. And jury verdicts are rendered all the time, some right, some wrong, some tossed on appeal. There was no astonishment factor apparent in this verdict.

I guess the exclamation point seemed judgmental to me. It had a "see there!" quality to me.

Judgmental, that's something I know a little something about myself. Back when I had life all figured out I carried quite a bit more than my share of "judgmental" in my hip pocket.

I employed it liberally.

I tossed it out based on opinion and reaction and the imposition of my values.

But life happens, lessons are learned, observations sink in.

I'm trying to empty my pockets of judgmental. It's hard to do. Old patterns are comfortable. It doesn't help, however, that I was wrong more often than right. Didn't know half the story, didn't have the background to understand.

The older I get, the fewer absolutes I know. And the rules keep changing.

I was once one of three

named defendants in a civil case. It was a contract dispute for money damages.

My lawyer warned me that the verdict likely would hinge on whether or not the jury thought it was the insurance company that would pay the award.

Guilty as charged!?

In later years, it was me on the other end of filing a lawsuit in Federal court for food poisoning by a major fast food chain. That entire process made me feel like a victim of the poisoning and of the court system. In the shadows I felt "judged" by some friends for having filed the suit at all.

Guilty as charged!?

What does it mean?

The State of Illinois has a moratorium on executions because 3% of those on death row were later proved to be innocent.

Guilty as charged!?

I don't see any cause for exclamation point.

Then again, I should really start with my own exclamation points that need retracting.