writingaboutwriting2ebim

Getting Ready to Read

Getting Ready to Read

Before you read, do at least one of the following activities:

Combine and rewrite the following two sentences in three different ways, by conveying the information from number 2 at the beginning, middle, and end of number 1.
1. My sister’s treehouse made a great place to play with her friends.
2. The treehouse was made of wood scraps and cardboard.
Once you’ve written the three versions of the sentence, try to explain the grammar rules you used in writing each.
Poll your friends to see what they learned about grammar rules and how “bendable” they are, or aren’t, from their earlier instruction in English or writing.
Try writing a definition of what aspects of writing count as “grammar.” For example, is punctuation grammar? What about the rule in the first sentence of this activity that puts the period inside the quotation mark? Is that grammar, or something else? What about spelling—is that grammar? How about syntax—word order and how phrases hook together? In short, what counts as grammar in your mind?

As you read, consider the following questions:

According to Dawkins, if we want to know how writing works, where should we look? Who is likely to disagree with Dawkins here? Why?
What should we conclude, in Dawkins’s view, about writing that doesn’t seem to follow one set of rules?
What does Dawkins believe about rules as they relate to writing? Are there, in his view, universal rules that apply to writing? If so, what are they?
Is there, in your opinion, any value to handbooks that reduce writing to a set of hard-and-fast rules?

Punctuation—just one of the “mechanics” of writing, after all—is perhaps not the first thing you turn to after checking the CCC table of contents, but you are here now, so let me try to keep you here by announcing, quickly, the not unimportant claims to be made. First, manuals of style and college handbooks have it all wrong when it comes to punctuation (good writers don’t punctuate that way); there is, I propose, a system underlying what good writers, in fact, do; it is a surprisingly simple system; it is a system that enables writers to achieve important—even subtle—rhetorical effects; it is, even, a system that teachers can teach far more easily than they can teach the poorly systematized rules in our handbooks and style manuals.

It takes only a little study of the selections in our college readers to realize that the punctuation rules in handbooks and style manuals are not sacred texts for a great many good writers.

It takes only a little study of the selections in our college readers to realize that the punctuation rules in handbooks and style manuals are not sacred texts for a great many good writers. Fragments and comma splices, violations of the coordinate clause and elliptical coordinate clause rules for commas, and inconsistencies in use of the comma with introductory word, phrase, and clause—these and other failures to follow the rules are frequent enough to raise questions about the rules themselves. Quirk et al. have examined statistical data on the use of the comma to mark coordination and concluded: “These results show we are dealing with tendencies which, while clear enough, are by no means rules. In such cases, it is probable that the general truth that punctuation conforms to grammatical rather than rhetorical considerations is in fact overridden” (1060).

Moreover, handbook rules provide no instruction for use of the comma in the following:

(1) Slowly, he walked to the store.

(2) He walked, slowly, to the store.

(3) He walked to the store slowly.

And when we produce a sequence of three or more independent clauses, punctuation questions often cross sentence (or independent clause) boundaries, and handbooks do not offer help for such interdependent problems. Consider a sequence of three simple independent clauses:

(4) it caught my eye — I swiveled around — and the next instant, inexplicably, I was looking down at a weasel —

There weren’t any handbook rules to tell Annie Dillard to use a semicolon rather than a period or a dash or a colon or a comma splice between the first two clauses; or to follow that with a dash rather than a comma or a period or, yes, a colon between the last two.

And what do handbooks tell students about Orwell’s punctuation of the following sentences from “Marrakech”?

(5) It was very hot and the men had marched a long way. They slumped under the weight of their packs and the curiously sensitive black faces were glistening with sweat.

(6) When a family is travelling it is quite usual to see a father and a grown-up son riding ahead on a donkey, and an old woman following on foot, carrying the baggage.

According to the handbooks, Orwell is wrong, for their rules are essentially a right-or-wrong approach, providing little—if any—basis for considering options according to rhetorical intentions. Such instruction is negative in that it tells students what not to do and how not to do it; better instruction—in any skill, I assume—is going to tell students what to do and how to do it, it is going to encourage the “good” behaviors, not discourage the bad.