Reading Level: Grade 3
Topics: Wordplay, Writing
Poetic Techniques: Lyric & Dramatic Poems, Punctuation, Wordplay
Word Count: 121

About This Poem

I’ve always loved wordplay, especially poems that play around with the nuts and bolts of language, things like spelling, word order, and the way words look and sound on the page. Over the years, I’ve written poems that make silly use of parentheses, hyphens, and even the spacing between words, just to see what kind of mischief I could get into.

While I was thinking about other punctuation marks I might work into a poem someday—commas, question marks, slashes, brackets, and so on—it suddenly occurred to me that I’d somehow skipped the most obvious one of all. Exclamation points! They’re loud, they’re enthusiastic, and they have a way of making everything feel more exciting… sometimes a little too exciting.

This poem imagines what might happen if someone got just a bit carried away with them.

If this is your kind of poem too, here are a few more you’re going to love:

• I’m Always in Parentheses
• Hap-the-Happy-Hyphenator
• It’sFunToLeaveTheSpacesOut
• 1 H0P3 7H47 Y0U C4N R34D 7H15
• im rlly gd @ txting

Worksheet

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