In relation to oral fluency, punctuation represents the dynamic features of the voice: intonation, loudness, speed, rhythm, and pause – what are technically called the prosodic features of speech – and it’s illuminating to compare speech and writing from this point of view. Punctuation makes its contrasts, literally, in black and white terms. The dynamic features of speech are not like that; they are an indefinite number of shades of grey. A pitch level can gradually rise, tone by tone, until something that began as a statement ends up as a question; but a period does not gradually morph into a question mark. Information is always being left out, therefore, when speech is written down. And conversely, information is always being added when a written text is spoken aloud.
An adaptation of the old dictation pedagogy can be rewarding: a class writes down a dramatically spoken utterance, and sees what punctuation variation turns up among their responses. They then ‘back translate’ – reading the different versions aloud, and seeing which corresponds most closely to the original and where the punctuation has let them down. This way they learn the limitations of punctuation – that it isn’t a perfect system and can’t solve all problems in the graphic representation of speech. An important aim is to draw students’ attention to the places where the system breaks down, and to suggest ways around the difficulties. They need to see what punctuation can’t do as well as what it can do.
Speaking aloud can also draw attention to places where a wrong punctuation decision has been made, as in the case of comma splices (Chapter 22). This common error usually remains unnoticed while writing, but becomes more obvious if what is written is then read aloud. But there’s a caveat: if young writers read their own work aloud they may pass over the error, as they already know the meaning of what they’ve written about. The problem is much more likely to surface if a child other than the writer reads the piece aloud.
Recognize the hierarchical system
This principle governed the central part of the book, from Chapters 13 to 29. It expresses the fact that the various punctuation marks don’t all operate at the same grammatical level: some relate to paragraphs, some to sentences, some to clauses, some to phrases, some to words, and some to parts of words. But at each level, the marks work in a systematic way – even though there are exceptions and variations. Getting the idea of a system across to students is probably the most important intuition about punctuation that a teacher can convey.
To say that punctuation is a system means simply that, at any one place in a written discourse, a choice has to be made from the set of options the language makes available (Chapter 13). The important thing, therefore, is to make students aware of what the semantic and pragmatic options are. No one punctuation mark can ever be satisfactorily explained in isolation, and it should never be taught in isolation. There should always be a contrast with some other mark. To discover the function of the semicolon: replace it by something else, and see what happens (Chapter 22). To work out how to handle end-placed adverbials: reflect on the available options, such as those in the series Come here immediately (Chapter 25). To develop a sense of the semantic function of an ellipsis: add continuations to groups of sentences as in It’s time you went home … (Chapter 16). This is where teaching punctuation can get quite exciting, when a class of youngsters act out the consequences of one punctuation mark being used in a story rather than another. When there are no clear-cut rules to guide usage, we need to build up students’ intuitions about good practice by getting them to reflect on as many instances as possible. This can come unconsciously just from reading a lot; but the issue can be neatly focused by presenting learners with a judicious selection of examples.
Work within genres
In a pragmatic approach, it’s important to ensure that the choices are presented within a single genre. It would make no sense to consider together the use of a comma in a newspaper and the use of a colon in a legal text. That wouldn’t be a real choice. Rather, we need to select the punctuation options that operate within an individual genre, so that students can see how the system is put to work. What do journalists do? More specifically, what do journalists on a particular paper do? The trick is to find genres that are motivating, given the age and background of the students’ point of view. Journalism may not be of interest, but there are plenty of punctuation-using alternatives in computer games, text messages, advertisements, best-selling stories … What can be done with James Joyce or E E Cummings can also be done with Roald Dahl and Terry Pratchett.
Inculcating a sense of language appropriateness in different genres (varieties, styles, registers … terminology varies) is the foundation of the modern approach to mother-tongue language pedagogy. For the teacher, the main challenge is to draw students’ attention to the stylistic differences between them, and especially to the differences between standard and nonstandard usage. This is especially important in relation to genres where nonstandard punctuation is the default practice, as in several online situations (Chapter 33). For a young learner (and for older users too) the challenge is not to mix the two worlds up. The media panic is that new punctuation habits learned in the online nonstandard world will transfer to the offline standard one. This won’t happen if the differences have been thoroughly explored and understood.
Highlight consistency
I’ve repeatedly mentioned a principle that all punctuation commentators respect: the need for an individual writer to be consistent. But how is this to be achieved when there’s so much stylistic variation around? In the days when children had most of their primary education from a single teacher, the maxim would be ‘Do as I do’, which worked well enough. That would guarantee consistency – or, at least, a consistency that was no worse than that of their model! Today, children are taught by several teachers and classroom assistants as they progress, and are exposed to many more unofficial ‘teachers’ outside school, such as parents and online peers. Given that there is so much personal variation, how is consistency to be achieved now?
A recurrent message of government reports into language, from the Bullock Report (1975) on, is the role of a school language policy. This is especially important when it comes to punctuation. A situation where Teacher P insists on a comma at a certain place whereas Teacher Q insists on the opposite, without any explanation being given, is unlikely to foster a confident use of punctuation. A punctuation policy doesn’t mean that all the teachers need to adopt the same pattern of use – which would be difficult to implement, given their different personal histories and the deep-rooted nature of punctuation habits – but it does mean that they need to be aware of the differences in individual practice that exist (including between school and home, or school and examining board), so that they can alert their charges to the variation and establish pragmatic guidelines. Children will never develop a consistent personal punctuational style if they don’t see a coherent model around them.
Take account of the child’s point of view
With young readers (and often with older ones too), teachers should be aware of what the learners bring to the literacy table. Even very young children will already have encountered punctuation marks in various settings, and will have formed some opinions about them. As I suggested in Chapter 14, we therefore need to understand punctuation from the child’s point of view. This was part of the message of Emilia Ferreiro and Ana Teberosky’s hugely illuminating Literacy before Schooling (1983), a book about all aspects of the way children think about literacy, and which included examples of what they had to say about punctuation. One of the children they studied, Mariona, age five, describes punctuation marks as ‘head letters’ because ‘you think them but you don’t say them’. Another, Alejandra, also age five, was shown two cards: THEBEAREATSHONEY and DAD KICKS THE BALL, and the authors comment:
We ask her if she thinks it is okay and she says no. When we ask if something should be corrected, she responds, ‘Here I have to put other letters,’ and she begins filling in letters in the blank spaces of the sentence wi
th the conventional separations.
This is an intriguing reverse of what an adult would expect.
The literacy hierarchy was also the motivation behind the acclaimed LARR test of the 1980s (Linguistic Awareness in Reading Readiness, by John Downing and others), which is still as relevant as ever. LARR assessed the extent to which a child understands the meaning of literacy metalanguage, from its most general terms (‘reading’, writing’) down to points of detail. For punctuation, it presented short pieces of text and asked children to perform a simple circling task:
(a) Dr. Smith bought a car. [Circle each thing that is a full stop (period).]
(b) Sandy, Bruce and James ran home. [Circle each full stop (period).]
(c) Can all birds fly? Yes, they can. But can an emu fly? [Circle each thing that is a question mark.]
As children develop their linguistic awareness, they make some interesting decisions, such as circling only the second period in (a) because ‘it goes at the end’, or circling the comma as well as the period in (b). Engaging a child in a discussion of what punctuation is all about is always mutually beneficial. It is the message also of Help Your Child to Read and Write, and More (see the Interlude to Chapter 14): ‘Discussion of the physical aspects of a book, including the lay-out of the pages, will help them to understand what they themselves must do as writers.’ And it is the basis of the excellent Punctuation Project, led by Sue Sing and Nigel Hall at Manchester Metropolitan University, which is based on the belief that young children ‘have the ability to talk freely about punctuation in ways that would offer insights into how they thought about it’.
One of the findings of this kind of research is to highlight the importance of choosing terms that don’t confuse young learners. For example, describing an apostrophe as a ‘little raised comma’, won’t help, as there’s nothing linguistically in common between the two. And while the term ‘speech marks’ is fairly transparent, to express what’s going on when people are speaking, it needs to be carefully watched, for (as we saw in Chapter 31) these marks are also used in quite a wide range of other circumstances in which people aren’t speaking at all. It isn’t a difficult matter discovering the way punctuation terms can confuse children: they will tell you themselves.
Make the task more appealing
This is definitely the teacher’s domain, but authors have made a contribution too, by incorporating punctuation terms into their fiction. The ability to talk about language is known to be a critical element in the development of literacy, so anything that fosters this awareness in relation to punctuation is likely to be helpful, such as anthropomorphic or zoomorphic stories about how punctuation marks behave. Here are three:
‘The comma that didn’t belong anywhere’, a short story by American writer Martha Baird, and filmed by Ken Kimmelman in 2009 as Thomas Comma – the adventure of a lonely comma looking for the right sentence.
In the Land of Punctuation (an illustrated translation of the comic poem by German writer Christian Morgenstern written in 1905). It begins (in Sirish Rao’s version): The peaceful land of Punctuation
is filled with tension overnight
When the stops and commas of the nation
call the semicolons ‘parasites’.
(It’s quite a violent story!)
Punctuation Bestiary, by American writer Kiran Spees. We see the two ears of a pair of rabbits morph into quotation marks … a frog’s long tongue turns into a dash …
Punctuation can be fun: that is the message of books like these. And there is no limit to the games that can be devised to put this principle into practice. Authors such as Cummings and Joyce show us various ways of playing with punctuation (Chapter 30). Percival Leigh rewrote famous texts – ‘taking liberties’ with punctuation, as he put it (Chapter 11). Thanks to YouTube, even quite young students can watch (and adapt) Danish comedian Victor Borge’s famous sketch in which he gives a distinctive noise to every punctuation mark and reads out passages, with hilarious results. And there are endless opportunities to replicate the way artists use punctuation in comics and cartoons, where the marks can replace whole sentences and convey reactions in the manner of emoticons. Charles Schulz was a master of this technique. Here are four of his strips from a September 1964 punctuation sequence:
Become an MP
Teachers have to show their students how to manage punctuation, which means not just getting their charges to read a lot, but guiding them towards an informed awareness of the nature of the system and of the stylistic differences that exist. A good linguistically based grounding in punctuation should give students a solid understanding of what the rules are – remembering, as Kurt Vonnegut said (Chapter 22), ‘Rules only take us so far’ – and an appreciation of the problems to be faced when applying them. It should draw attention to the strengths and limitations of the system as a whole. The ultimate aim is to nurture the ability to ‘translate’ from one genre to the other as occasion demands, thereby fostering a mature and confident control of punctuational styles. We all need to become MPs – ‘masters of punctuation’.
References and further reading
Chapters 1–10
Blake, N F. Caxton’s Own Prose. London: André Deutsch, 1973.
Crystal, D. Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices. London: British Library, 2010.
Crystal, D. The Stories of English. London: Penguin, 2004.
Parkes, M B. Pause and Effect: An Introduction to Punctuation in the West. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1992.
Roberts, J. Guide to Scripts Used in English Writing up to 1500. London: British Library, 2005.
Saenger, P. Space between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.
Chapters 11–12
Crystal, D. Making Sense of Grammar. London: Penguin, 2004.
Sutherland, K. Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts: A Digital Edition. Available at http://www.janeausten.ac.uk.
Sutherland, K. Jane Austen’s Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Chapters 13–34
Barfoot, C. ‘Trouble with the apostrophe: or, you know what hairdresser’s are like’, in I Tieken-Boon van Ostade and J Frankis (eds), Language Usage and Description: Studies Presented to N E Osselton on the Occasion of his Retirement. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991, 121–39.
Baron, N and Ling, R. ‘Necessary smileys & useless periods’. Visible Language 45 (1/2), 2011, 45–67.
Carey, G V. Mind the Stop (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939; London: Penguin Books 1971).
Crystal, D. The Fight for English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Crystal, D. ‘On a not very bright grammar test’. 12 September 2013 at
Deck, J and Herson, B. The Great Typo Hunt. New York: Crown.
Fowler, H W. A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), edited by D Crystal. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Gowers, E. Plain Words (1948), revised and updated by R Gowers. London: Penguin, 2014.
Hale, C and Scanlon, J. Wired Style. New York: Broadway Books, 1999.
Houston, K. Shady Characters. London: Penguin, 2013.
Kay, C, Roberts, J, Samuels, M and Wotherspoon, I. The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Ledgard, F W. Punctuation. London: Cassell, 1977.
Mackay, D and Simo, J. Help Your Child to Read and Write, and More. London: Penguin, 1976.
Miller, G A. ‘The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information’, in G A Miller, The Psychology of Communication. Baltimore. MD: Penguin, 1967, 14–44.
Partridge, E. You Have a Point There. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953.
Quirk, R, Greenbaum, S, Leech, G and Svartvik, J. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman, 1985.
Strunk, W and White, E B. The Element
s of Style. Original edition by Strunk, 1918. Joint revised edition, New York: Macmillan, 1959.
Toner, A (ed.). Punctuation. A special issue of Visible Language 45 (1/2), 2011.
Truss, L. Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. London: Profile Books, 2003.
Appendix
Baird, B. ‘The comma that didn’t belong anywhere’, filmed by Ken Kimmelman as Thomas Comma. New York: Imagery Film Ltd, 2009.
Downing, J, Ayers, D and Schaefer, B. Linguistic Awareness in Reading Readiness. Windsor: NFER-Nelson, 1983.
Ferreiro, E and Teberosky, A. Literacy before Schooling. London: Heinemann, 1983.
Morgenstern, C. In the Land of Punctuation (Im Reich der Interpunktionen, 1905), illustrated by Rathna Ramanathan, translated by Sirish Rao. Chennai: Tara Books, 2009.
Sing, S and Hall, N. ‘Listening to children think about punctuation’, in A Carter, T Lillis and S Perkin (eds), Why Writing Matters. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2009, 189–203.
Spees, K. Punctuation Bestiary. Seattle, WA: Excite Kids, 2011.
User Design. Punctuation …?
Illustration credits
Alamy 349; Ashmolean Museum, 2; Author’s photographs xii, 350; British Library 4, 12, 19, 26, 34, 86, 98, 112, 194, 320; Charles Schultz estate 360; Oxford Gazette 113; Punch 131, 133, 156, 156, 258, 273; Second Aeon Publications 200
While every effort has been made to contact copyright-holders of illustrations, the author and publishers would be grateful for information about any illustrations where they have been unable to trace them, and would be glad to make amendments in further editions.
Index
A
abbreviations 137
acute accent 82
address punctuation 90
admiration see exclamation mark
Making a Point Page 30
