![\"\"](\"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/Screen-Shot-2018-09-22-at-7.31.33-AM.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nIt turns out that my sense that the use of exclamation points in conference talks had shot up in recent years was incorrect. Talks certainly have more exclamation points now than they did a hundred years ago, but they\u2019ve had a relatively high number of exclamation points since the 1980s. In the 2010s, we have 1,133.77 per million words; in the 1980s, we had 1,139.89. If we look year by year, we find that 1987 had the most exclamation points (1,538.06 per million words), followed closely by 2013 (1,512.05). The most chill conference year in terms of punctuation was in 1866 (71.36).
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This breakdown of exclamation point usage led me to wonder about question mark usage through the years at general conference. How does the use of questions in conference compare to the use of rhetorical shouting as time goes on? The corpus does allow you to compare two words over time with one search, but the search terms have to be at least three characters long or else the search won\u2019t run properly. So, we have to do the comparison manually. Here are the results for question marks: I didn\u2019t have an intuitive sense beforehand what the numbers would look like for this, but for some reason I was still surprised to see how question mark usage had dropped off after the 1880s and remained at a pretty steady state from decade to decade ever since. Note, however, that in absolute terms, conference talks have way more question marks than exclamation points. For instance, in the 2010s, talks contained 2,637.87 question marks per million words, compared to 1,133.77 exclamation points. I\u2019m not a linguist, and I\u2019m not qualified to speculate on why the use of exclamation points and question marks vary from decade to decade. I am grateful, though, for tools like this corpus that let me check my gut feelings to see whether they match reality. And I find it fascinating to explore how eternal truths are expressed through ever-changing language and methods from generation to generation. Do you find yourself using more exclamation marks in your talks than you used to? Do you think the mark has taken on a new meaning as we\u2019ve started to communicate more through text and tweet? I\u2019d love to hear what people think! Thanks for reading!!!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As I\u2019ve been re-reading talks from the latest general conference, something keeps standing out to me: the exclamation points. General authorities these days don\u2019t shout when they give their talks. Had I been transcribing these talks when I listened to them last April, I wouldn\u2019t have used many exclamation points. But reviewing the written talks, I see so many, and that made me wonder whether this is a new thing. Are general conference talks including more exclamation points than they have in the past? Of course, I don\u2019t have to wonder. BYU linguistics professor Mark Davies has created a tool that allows anyone to answer questions like this for themselves. As this very blog reported in 2011, the Corpus of LDS General Conference Talks built by Professor Davies collects over 10,000 conference talks and makes them searchable. This tool can show you how often a word or phrase has been used in talks over time, charting the changes decade by decade and even year by year. The tool works for punctuation marks, too. Here\u2019s what it shows: It turns out that my sense that the use of exclamation points in conference talks had shot up in recent years was incorrect. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10398,"featured_media":38253,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-politics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/Screen-Shot-2018-09-22-at-7.31.33-AM.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10398"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38252"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38255,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38252\/revisions\/38255"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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