He was a rich merchent''make exclamatory sentence''?

Answer 1

He was a rich merchent''make exclamatory sentence''?I hardly know where to begin! (That, by the way, was an exclamatory sentence. I was exclaiming about all your grammatical, punctuation and spelling errors.) Let's start with spelling. The word is spelled merchant, not merchent. That was the easy part. Next, let's deal with punctuation. Your intention was to quote a sentence that said something about someone. You wanted to quote a statement saying that someone was a rich merchant. Then you wanted to ask if the statement was an exclamatory sentence. When you quote something, the words you quote get enclosed in quotation marks. Oops! You got it completely turned around. This is the way your sentence should have been punctuated: "He was a rich merchant," make exclamatory sentence? We're not finished yet. "He was a rich merchant," is a complete sentence in itself. But adding 'make exclamatory sentence' does not turn the entire passage into a complete sentence. You wanted to ask whether the sentence "He was a rich merchant," was an exclamatory sentence. The words 'make exclamatory sentence' do not accomplish this. There is no interrogative aspect to what you have written. You haven't asked a question. (Furthermore, the verb 'make' is not a very accurate choice of words.) Here's what you really wanted to ask: Is "He was a rich merchant," an exclamatory sentence? Simple, huh? So let's deal with that issue now. The answer to your question is, 'Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't.' "He was a rich merchant," looks like a simple declaratory sentence to me. It is a complete thought. It states a fact. There doesn't seem to be anything unusual about it. Is there anything unusual about the fact that he was a rich merchant? Would someone be surprised to learn that he was a rich merchant? Is it shocking to anyone that he was a rich merchant? Would someone exclaim, with wide-eyed amazement, that he was a rich merchant? Or is this just a plain, ordinary, every-day, ho-hum statement? What turns a declarative statement into an exclamatory statement is not the structure of the sentence. It is the context in which the statement is made. Is the context 'ho-hum' or is it shocking? A 'ho-hum' statement gets nothing more than a 'ho-hum' period. A shocking statement, a statement that is exclaimed, deserves (indeed, requires) an exclamation mark. I have carried on with this, at great length, because what you wrote could have been easy to read, but wasn't. It only takes a little effort to write well, and it's worth the effort. Next time, I hope you'll devote just a little more effort to writing clearly.