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ACT English 4.10 Passage Drill 186 Views


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ACT English: Passage Drill Drill 4, Problem 10. Should the writer change the exclamation mark into a period in the previous sentence?

Language:
English Language

Transcript

00:03

Here’s your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by the Kitamura FCM-8006W.

00:09

Which won the award for most unimaginative name for a fortune cookie machine in 1981 and 1982.

00:32

The writer is considering changing the exclamation

00:34

mark in the previous sentence to a period. Should the writer make this change?

00:38

And here are the potential answers...

00:43

The author is right to be wary of the exclamation mark.

00:46

Exclamation marks should only be used if we have something astounding to say;

00:53

they should be reserved for when we want to put some extra oomph behind a sentence.

00:58

Overuse maxes out the volume on every sentence, making it impossible to emphasize the thing

01:03

we really want people to hear.

01:05

With that in mind, let’s go through the answer options to see if we can find a reason

01:09

to get rid of the exclamation mark in this question.

01:12

Option B.

01:13

Option (B) isn’t a good reason to nix an exclamation mark; they have nothing to do

01:17

with whether a sentence is closely related to the topic at hand.

01:20

We want to cut things that are irrelevant, right?

01:23

Why would we want to broadcast them to the world?

01:25

Choice (A) give us no valid reason to cut the exclamation mark either. It doesn’t

01:29

matter if one has been previously used in the passage.

01:32

As we said before, exclamation marks do their jobs best when there aren’t many of them.

01:37

They’re a tool to help a writer make a particular sentence stand out from the crowd.

01:41

We’re gonna say no to choice (D) as well.

01:43

The language in the passage is far from academic or dense.

01:47

In fact, it’s pretty casual and easy-going.

01:50

Anyway, if we were trying to write something super academic, we wouldn’t want to throw

01:54

in an exclamation mark simply to lighten things up.

01:57

It would feel random, and then people would see through how smart we were trying to sound.

02:01

(C) is the right answer because it correctly identifies the tone of the passage and the

02:05

role of the sentence within it.

02:07

This passage is informal, so it can totally get away with an exclamation mark.

02:11

After all, 8,000 cookies is a lot for one machine to make in an hour!

02:17

Did you hear that exclamation mark we just used?

02:34

Boom.

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