The punctuative errors that commonly appear in intermediate writers' essays reflect the students' inexperience with formal writing and therefore with the punctuative code that serves to signal meanings readers would otherwise miss. Although the code includes more than a dozen marks, intermediate writers use only the most common: the capital, the comma, the period, the question mark, the exclamation mark, and the quotation mark. Semicolons appear infrequently; parentheses, hyphens and dashes appear less often; and ellipses, brackets and italics appear almost never. That means intermediate writers express little through punctuation, whereas advanced writers with knowledge of such slight notations add both flexibility and meaning to their sentences. Parentheses and dashes, for example, help writers overcome the linearity of sentences, and colons are an economical way to present series. From a reader's point of view, punctuation provides guidance for one who must otherwise proceed intermittently through a writer's thoughts.
Speaking and Writing
Limited mainly to periods and commas, an inexperienced writer is further restricted by her uncertain use of such marks: commas appear at odd junctures within sentences, and both commas and periods signal sentential terminations, or what appear to be terminations, for the writer frequently mistakes a fragment for a whole sentence or joins two sentences with a comma (comma splice) or with no punctuation at all (run-on). The difficulty with signifying the boundaries of sentences has led some to complain that students nowadays "don't know what an English sentence is." That is, of course, not true. They intuitively understand the structure of sentences; they have been speaking in sentences since childhood. What they have not been doing, however, is stopping to consider whether their speech contains, among other things, a subject and predicate or has a dependent clause. In other words they have been creating diverse sentences without knowing the nomenclature for the constructions they have been producing.
One reason writing sentences is difficult stems from the differences between speech and writing. Oral communication is economical, progressing without complex syntax. Gestures, facial expressions, and alternate responses advance a conversation. Those who formally write as they talk--and/or message--are not accustomed to using their entire syntactic repertoire. Writing sentences requires punctuative marks that have few equivalents in speech. Although we temporally pause in oral conversations, we indicate such pauses in written communication with an array of symbols, each mark having a slightly different function and effect.
Without some convention for showing the groupings and relationships of words, for suggesting pace and intonation, the written sentence becomes a puzzle to reader. Readers expect sentences to contain conventional punctuation; readers also expect the most important information to be at the beginnings and ends of sentences. The beginning of a sentence reveals the subject and either establishes a context for new information or links the sentence to the preceding one by providing transitional information. The end of the sentence reveals new information. Whatever is in the middle receives the least attention from the reader. An inexperienced writer must learn to place information in the correct area--helping her readers move fluidly from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, section to section.
In order to do such, she must be certain about where written sentences end. The fact that she produces sentences in speech does not mean she understands periods in writing. Frequently an inexperienced writer perceives periods as signals for major pauses and commas as signals for minor pauses, but she is not aware of the role that grammatical structure plays in determining which of the many pauses produced in speech need marks and which do not need marks. Speech is, again, an intermixture of sounds and silences. Half of spontaneous speech is nonspeech--with pauses marking rates of respiration, isolating certain words for emphasis, facilitating phonological maneuvers, regulating the rhythms of thought and articulation, and suggesting grammatical structure. In contrast punctuation provides a sense of structure in a sentence--first by indicating its boundaries and second by showing relationships among certain words, phrases and clauses within the sentence. To state it simply, punctuation helps a reader predict how a sentence is leading him.
Leading a reader is difficult for a writer to do without an analytical grasp of the sentence. Grammatically dependent structures at the ends of sentences may seem independent, adverbial clauses at the beginnings of sentences may seem like sentences, the second part of a compound structure may seem like a sentence, or a string of sentences may feel like a single sentence. A haphazard approach to punctuation thwarts one of the primary purposes of punctuation, which is to help the reader see in advance how the part he is about to read relates to what he has just read. If he sees a period, he prepares himself for a new subject; if he sees a comma, he withholds closure. But when such marks are interchanged, transposed or omitted, the code no longer works.
We can blame some of the inconsistencies, inventions and omissions on carelessness. The small marks do not look very important. They do not seem to mean much either, at least nothing that the writer does not know already through her writer's ear, which guides her in both the writing and reading of her own sentences. But aural competency does not necessarily correlate to physical reality, an ability to manage the structures that writers depend upon to overcome the redundancy, fragmentation and loose sequences that are natural in speech--adverbial clauses, participial phrases, relative clauses, appositional constructions, and logical connectives such as therefore and however.
What one senses through puctuative errors is a caution about losing control of the sentence by allowing it to become too long--that is, too full of embedded structures. Combined with the effort to simplify individual sentences grammatically by separating them into smaller segments is another effort to link sentences rhetorically by using commas as conjunctions; by overusing words like and, but, that or because; or by ignoring terminal punctuation. Both strategies--fragmenting information and linking information--reveal larger problems in composition.
Fragmenting Information
The urge to fragment information reflects a need to practice with the recognition and creation of simple subjective and predicative phrases, with the embedding of clauses within sentences (focusing on who, which, that, when and if forms), with the embedding of appositional forms, and with the embedding of -ing phrases. Writer's handbooks--such as The Scott, Foresman Handbook for Writers
and The Little, Brown Handbook
--contain exercises that both help intermediate writers gain experience with embedding and give them a basic vocabulary of words that signal embedding, particularly those words that seem to lead to most fragments: wh-words, that, although, though, even though, unless, if, because, since, so that, et cetera. Because those words have meanings that can blur or merge with the meanings of linking words that do not embed (for examples, when and then, even though and nevertheless, because and thus), students will need to remember them in other ways. It may help to know that embedding words are not moveable, whereas logical connectives like then, nevertheless or thus do not need to be at the beginnings of sentences. Linking Information
The urge to link information--the second compositional problem--reflects a need to learn the different ways in which sentences can rhetorically transcend their punctuative boundaries. A speaker stops when she ends a unit of thought, which is often short of a complete sentence. For many inexperienced writers, the need to mark sentences inhibits the progress of their thoughts. In speech they can produce sentences as unconsciously as they can walk; in writing they must stop to deliberate over what is and what is not a sentence. In the process they break the rhythm of their thoughts. As a result such writers seem to use commas to continue the thought between sentences. Similar to a comma, and prolongs sentences. Although and frees the writer from the work of making her sentences reflect the different levels of generalizations that her thoughts imply, it imposes upon the reader the work of trying to determine what the relationships are.
Excepting most writing teachers, readers will not expend the energy to discover the relationships. Thus, the writer must learn to use the two forms that substitute for the period: a comma before a coordinating conjunction (and, but, for, or and so) and a semicolon.
Comma
The rules intermediate writers have learned for punctuating and are unreliable. Some students use no punctuation; other insert a comma before all ands. Most students have never begun a sentence with and (or but). Where the focus on punctuation is on sentential boundaries, the student needs to realize that a comma before an and has the significance of a period--that is, it signals the end of one sentence and the beginning of another. Without it the two sentences would collide, forcing the reader to retrace his steps. Thus, the sentence "She likes her dog and other dogs like her" may be read initially as "She likes her dog and other dogs" until the reader discovers that he has beheaded the second sentence by mistaking the function of and as a coordinator of two direct objects rather than two sentences. With a comma the writer had a chance to prepare the reader for a new sentence. As for beginning, rather than joining, sentences with and (and but), the student may have learned incorrectly to view it as an error. But usage clearly permits it.
Semicolon
Like a period and a comma before a coordinating conjunction, a semicolon announces the beginning of another sentence. But intermediate writers rarely use it, probably because students must learn a vocabulary of logical connectives if they want to reduce the pressure on commas and coordinators. Although the full vocabulary is extensive, most of the words signal roughly one of six types of logical relationships: furthermore, however, therefore, for example, that is, and then.
Learning to use such connectives is a matter not of learning to be logical as of learning to signal the logic that usually is implicit in what students are communicating. Intermediate writers need to be aware of the options they have in placing and punctuating such connectives. Whereas periods, coordinators and semicolons are not moveable forms because they signify grammatical boundaries, logical connectives are moveable--their most common locations being at the beginning of a sentence when a preceding sentence is terminated by a semicolon and at various points after a subject when a preceding sentence is terminated by a period.
Conclusion
Rather than teaching sentences via rhetorical classifications (loose, balanced and periodic) or grammatical categories (simple, compound, complex and compound-complex), sentence-combining and sentence-decombining exercises will increase the complexity of intermediate writers' sentences. Such exercises, which are in many writers' handbooks, reveal ways to construct sentences without resorting to terminology, and they allow discussions of rhetorical choices, differences in emphasis that work more effectively in some contexts than in others.
