Errors and Expectations: Chapter Two

Handwriting and Punctuation

Page 15: The physical act of writing, of moving the pen or pencil (or typewriter) across the page so as to form decipherable words without great effort, is of course fundamental to other writing skills. Yet students have often not mastered this skill by the end of high school.

I have often had students tell me when they come into my writing classes that they neither read nor do they write. Many either haven't or have no memory of writing a formal academic essay in high school, and I've heard similar anecdotes from my colleagues.

Page 17: Although the full punctuation vocabulary of the code includes at least a dozen marks, the writer at this level uses only the three most common marks: the period, the comma, and the capital. Question marks, exclamation marks, or quotation marks appear infrequently, and often incorrectly; semicolons even less often; parentheses, hyphens, dashes almost never; and the special uses of such “academic” marks as ellipsis dots, brackets, and underlining are unknown. This means, of course, that the basic writer can say little through punctuation, whereas the experienced writer with a command of these slight notations adds both flexibility and meaning to his sentences.

…and what happens is that even though writers use periods and commas, they often use them incorrectly. That doesn’t mean, though, that they don’t know what sentences are. They’ve been making great sentences all along in their speaking. Speaking doesn’t include the placement of periods and commas, though.

**Shaughnessy suggests that we look at students' sentence boundary patterns to see what their logic is. Sometimes students see sentences as “rhetorical units” that are different (longer or shorter) than the grammatical sentence. Remember, periods feel very final to students, and to end one sentence is to have to start another, which can be a formidable task for the basic writer.

Page 24: Modern punctuation…sharpen(s) the sense of structure in a sentence, first by marking off its boundaries and second by showing how certain words, phrases, or clauses within the sentence are related…This is difficult for a writer to do without an analytical grasp of the sentence. Otherwise, he must go by what “feels” like a sentence, and here his intuitions…are frequently wrong.

When students create fragments, they are trying to cut down sentences that might feel “out of control” to them, and when they create run-ons, they are trying to make sure similar ideas stay together in one (grammatically incorrect but, perhaps, rhetorically correct) sentence.

**Shaughnessy suggests that before studying punctuation, don’t begin with the marks but instead the sentence structures that make the marks necessary. Start with subject/predicate, then move to sentences within sentences (like who and if forms), then with appositional forms (ex: Rufus, a big and fluffy dog, needed a bath), and then –ing phrases.

Page 30: The speaker stops when he has ended a unit of thought, not necessarily when he has ended a unit of grammar called the sentence, which in fact often falls far short of a complete thought. For many beginning writers, the need to mark off sentences inhibits the progress of their thoughts.

**Shaughnessy suggests that we teach students their options for connecting sentences: embedding sentences in sentences and how to link sentences together. She suggests that the following words “invite the most fragments”: wh-words, that, unless, although/though/even though, if, because, since, and so that.

It’s also important for students to learn the rhetorical purpose of the coordinating conjunctions, specifically and, because the use of and is so prevalent in speech but can create confusion in writing.

Also, when teaching the semicolon (when used in between sentences, not necessarily lists), it’s important to talk about the relationship of example sentences between which the semicolon falls.
Exercises that get students used to logical connectives like however, then, and for example also helps them to understand the relationship between ideas and where those ideas might fall in a sentence.

Teaching tips:
1. Help students to understand the value of proper punctuation to the reader by having them exchange papers, read aloud unpunctuated paragraphs, etc.
2. Define the terms for the writers (often they don’t know the difference between a comma, a semicolon, and a colon, for example).
3. Take the time to figure out the student’s individual pattern of error.
4. Make the classroom an open environment where students feel comfortable discussing what they don’t know.
5. Remember, to place punctuation correctly, a student must first understand what a sentence is.