Meaning-Based Punctuation

Dawkins, John. “Teaching Meaning-Based Punctuation.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 31.2 (2003): 154-162.

I first read this article a couple years after it was published. My school’s assessment data had revealed that out of the several course outcomes, our composition students consistently had the most trouble with the one having to do with grammar and mechanics (based on our department’s home-grown portfolio assessment). I was the coordinator of the writing program at the time, and I read a large number of articles having to do with grammar instruction to try and develop suggestions for our faculty. I remember being impressed with this article, but I also remember not completely understanding it—especially how it might be applied in the classroom. Based on my renewed interest in grappling with grammar, I decided to revisit it.

This time around, I found it very comprehensible. Dawkins focuses on six punctuation options: the period, semicolon, colon, long dash, comma, and no punctuation (the last is included as a teaching aid). His goal is to teach students to “use meaning as a basis for decision making [about punctuation], not grammar-based rules” (155-56). Dawkins’s sequence of activities is designed to encourage students to recognize where in a sentence punctuation might go, and to consider how different marks of punctuation (or the conscious omission thereof) affect the meaning of the sentence and the relative emphasis of its parts.

Dawkins recommends that students start with “some degree of confidence in their sentence-recognition skills” (156). Although he provides a few suggestions for how to support this—mainly reading aloud and familiarizing students with what a fragment and a sentence look like through models—this is the weakest section of the article. In my experience with developmental writers, learning to recognize a sentence is a task that can take an entire semester (and sometimes beyond). I would have appreciated more discussion of this area.

However, the rest of Dawkins’s article is well developed, interesting, and useful. He recommends teachers begin by having students examine when to use commas, periods, or no punctuation, with thought to how each choice affects readability and meaning. Dawkins suggests (and I agree) that we emphasize to students that good papers need not contain any other marks of punctuation. (I go farther, and tell my students that good papers need not even contain commas, provided the sentences are clear and direct.) He then suggests the incorporation of long dashes as “similar to yet different from the comma” (158), the semicolon as similar to (but different than) the period, and finally the colon as punctuation that precedes more information. Dawkins provides excellent examples throughout.

Dawkins’s focus is clearly on getting students to consider meaning rather than rules as they punctuate, as his title suggests. His own prose is clear and exemplifies his theoretical stance—he himself does not always adhere to handbook rules, yet the article is extremely readable. I would recommend this to fellow teachers, and I plan to apply his sequence in the fall.