The move from academic writing to more business-oriented writing has shifted my methods of emphasis, and I’m starting to wonder if that’s good or bad.

Part of the shift is due to a difference in audience. With student writing, you’re not trying very hard to get anybody’s attention: professors are being paid to read your writing, and academics in general are in the habit of seeking out writing on subjects that interest them. While attention-grabbing is definitely necessary for some purposes in scholarly writing, you often have an audience seeking you out.

But in writing for On Co-op, I’m quite often trying to capture attention, rather than letting it come to me. This has resulted, thus far, in a lot of exclamation marks–a piece of punctuation that I’ve generally avoided.

Even in my creative writing, exclamation marks rarely appear outside of dialogue. The narrative voices I use usually don’t feel the need to shout, either because they are the semi-detached third-person type, or the irreverent first-person type. (Irreverence and exclamation marks don’t get along very well.) But when I’m making a pitch, trying to tell someone how great something is, I reach for the shift key and the number 1. It’s as if I’m expecting people to be tuned out even before reading, and I need to up the stakes to grab their eyes.

But I’m starting to wonder if this is self-fulfilling. If there’s enough noise in my environment (metaphorical or otherwise), I tend to tune out. When someone speaks softly, I lean closer. Maybe it would be more effective to recall some of my subtler methods of emphasis–like using a simple sentence after a series of compound/complex sentences, or creating a series of parallelisms building to a point, or even the judicious use of sentence fragments. Which would people respond to better, I wonder?

Some of this rumination comes out of discussions I’ve been having lately about advertising (with Mark here at On Co-op as well as others), and the way a general tendency to spin or embellish the facts has created a common skepticism. We expect advertisements to twist the truth, and so when we come across truth in advertising we still tend to adjust its claims downward to compensate for any lies.

So, is it impossible at this point to take the low-key approach? Would more subtle forms of emphasis in advertising be lost in the noise, or would they be the quiet voice that grabs attention?

I’m not sure–but I know I’m getting a little tired of pressing shift-1.