Raising and Lowering

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Within a sentence having a single independent clause, the basic marks are zero and comma:

(25) John asked for a date when he got the nerve.

(26) John asked for a date, when he got the nerve.

The comma gains some emphasis for the attachment. And, because of the nature of the hierarchy, the higher the mark the greater the emphasis:

(27) John asked for a date — when he got the nerve.

(28) John asked for a date. When he got the nerve.

Thus, justification for the sentence fragment.

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Pressure to use a mark higher in the hierarchy I call raising. It develops naturally when commas within a sentence boundary mark different degrees of separation; thus meaning can be made more clear by using a higher mark at the major boundary. In the following sentence by James Baldwin, pressure for raising will be felt where Baldwin used the semicolons:

(29) I don’t think the Negro problem in America can be even discussed coherently without bearing in mind its context; its context being the history, traditions, customs, the moral assumptions and preoccupations of the country; in short, the general social fabric.

Some writers might have resisted the pressure for the first semicolon and stayed with a comma; most, I think, would have used a dash instead of the second semicolon. In either case, the sentence illustrates conditions for raising.

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Raising, obviously, calls attention to itself, and thus gains emphasis. And it is this emphasis that Frost evidently felt a need for in the next example.

(30) I once heard of a minister who turned his daughter—his poetry-writing daughter—out on the street to earn a living, because he said there should be no more books written . . .

Raising is thus a device for gaining rhetorical effect. In (31) Alice Walker uses a comma instead of zero to gain emphasis; and in (32) Ellen Goodman chooses an even higher mark to gain even more emphasis:

(31) White men and women continued to run things, badly.

(32) Date rape, after all, occurs in a context, a culture that—still—expects men to be assertive and women to be resistant.

And why does Dillard want commas in the next example?

(33) I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go.

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Pressure for raising accounts for two rules in our handbooks—a semicolon rule and a dash rule. If one or more of the items in a series has internal commas or if the individual items are lengthy, a semicolon at the major boundaries is needed for clarity, as in a sentence by Forster:

(34) We read that the Franks built it in the thirteenth century and called it Misithras or Mistia; that it became the chief fortress in the Peloponnese during an uninteresting period; that it was taken from the Franks by the Byzantines, and from the Byzantines by the Turks; that it was governed by a long succession of tyrants whose lives were short and brutal.

If the interrupting material contains commas, there is need for a higher mark at the major boundaries, and the dash is appropriate because, unlike the semicolon, it can be used in pairs, as in a Lewis Thomas sentence.

(35) Although we are by all odds the most social of all social animals—more interdependent, more attached to each other, more inseparable in our behavior than bees—we do not often feel our conjoined intelligence.

I propose that the hierarchy and raising account for these rules systematically— if you know the system, you know how to do it—and more effectively than the disconnected, essentially unsystematized rules in handbooks.

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Notice, finally, that lowering—the opposite of raising—is also a natural consequence of understanding the hierarchical system. The semicolon in most of its uses, the comma splice, and the avoidance of a comma with a coordinator between independent clauses are common examples of lowering. Raising seems to be required, in certain contexts, to satisfy the need for clarity—as in (29), (34), (35). Lowering, on the other hand, does not seem to be required by a contextual need for clarity, except in a more subtle sense of this need, as in a good comma splice.