11 “Punctuation’s Rhetorical Effects”
Kevin Cassell
Overview
Many students tend to think of punctuation as governed by a set of rules. This chapter encourages them to conceive of punctuation as a system of conventions, which includes standard expectations of correct usage—certain “rules”—but applies them within a broader rhetorical context. After distinguishing between punctuation and grammar (the two terms are of- ten associated), students are provided with three reading strategies to help them become aware of how punctuation operates in printed texts. The first strategy, explicit reading, adopts Writing Spaces author Mike Bunn’s Reading Like a Writer (RLW) approach, but emphasizes a reading style that is sensory. The second strategy, visual reading, asks students to adopt a “typographical perspective” when reading so that they literally see how punctuation operates. The third one, aural reading, asks them to listen – possibly by reading aloud – to how punctuation conveys an author’s tone of voice, which can help to illustrate context. Palpably experiencing punctuation usage while reading will help students use it with confidence and facility in their own writing.
This chapter accommodates readers with hearing or visual impairments so they may participate in this sensory reading.
I recently shared a few short written expressions with students in my first-year writing class at the University of Arizona.* Each one was a sentence or two long and conveyed a different idea that related to language use. I didn’t tell my students who wrote them. I just projected each one on the classroom screen and asked them what they thought. They responded to the ideas of each quite well– until I put this final one up for them to read:
Alway’s; use the proper name, for thing’s. Fear, of a name increase’s fear, of the thing, itself.
Not a single student engaged with the idea here – that the way something’s named can cause people to have an emotional response to it. Instead, they severely critiqued the writing itself. As I had expected, they said the writer had “bad,” “clumsy,” even “horrible” grammar. When I asked for examples of this bad grammar, they said the apostrophes were wrong, the semicolon didn’t belong there, and there were too many incorrectly placed commas. I completely agreed with the problems they pointed out – except one.
If you ignore the apostrophes, the semicolon, and the commas, then you’ll see that the grammar of this two-sentence expression is fine. In fact, the original version had none of those punctuation marks. I put them there after taking it from one of the most popular books in the world – J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. If you’ve read this book, you may remember the half-blood wizard Professor Dumbledore explaining to young Harry why he calls the villainous Voldermort by his real name and not “the Dark Lord” or “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named,” which are terms that undeservedly inflate his status to mythic proportions (29