Teaching Punctuation as a Rhetorical Tool

JOHN DAWKINS

Dawkins, John. “Teaching Punctuation as a Rhetorical Tool.” College Composition and Communication 46.4 (1995): 533–48. Print.

Framing the Reading

John Dawkins focuses on problems with how people understand punctuation rules. Dawkins loads his article with examples (sixty-nine in all) that make it pretty difficult to deny that how good writers actually write makes handbook rules seem more like guidelines and less like laws. Dawkins offers a solution to the ways people construct “rules”: He uses his research across many sample texts to describe a deeper and more basic set of rules that seem more widely in use than the narrower handbook rules. You’ll be tempted to skim or even skip all the examples Dawkins offers as they begin to pile up. Try to resist that temptation, and you’ll learn a lot about how English works.

Dawkins wants us to think about grammar as rhetorical. By this point, you should start to have a pretty good feel for what the word rhetorical means: it has to do with choices that writers make to influence readers.

Stop and think about this for a moment: Dawkins is saying that grammar involves choices.

If you’re like most students, you learned grammar as a set of inflexible rules that had to be memorized and never violated. At best, you might have had a teacher who told you, when you pointed out how many grammar rules are violated by professional writers, that “you have to know the rules before you can break them” or who said, “When you’re a best-selling novelist, then you can break the rules, too.” Dawkins, however, raises the possibility that there are different sets of “rules” at work and that we might be better off studying actual writing and actual writers instead of slavishly following handbooks.