Jane,
That sounds like a clear and sensible approach. My college English
majors often had trouble with semi-colons too, and I did something
similar. I would explain, showing it on the board, that a semi-colon is
a comma raised by a period or a period lowered by a comma. That usually
made sense to them.
Herb
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jane Saral
Sent: Friday, January 11, 2008 1:24 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Commas in compound sentences
I like Craig's observation:
"The most common run-on sentence, usually a commas splice, in my
experience, is the one in which the second clause reasserts the first
in some way, as in "My father was a popular man, everyone seemed to
love him." I usually suggest the semi-colon for that pattern, which I
would describe as two intonation groups (two clauses), but only one
idea asserted. It's easiest to teach when there is a pattern, maybe a
half dozen or so in fairly close proximity."
When I taught the semi-colon as a way to fix these comma splices, I
proposed it as a three-quarter pause (with the comma being a half pause
and thus a little too wimpy for the situation and the period being a
full pause). Rather than telling kids all the time that they were
wrong, I would compliment them on their impulse to put the two sentences
together, for they were sensing the closer connection. I would tell
them that the instinct showed their growing sophistication about rhythms
and relationships in their writing. The only problem was that they were
sending the boy (half-pause comma) to do the man's job (three-quarter
pause semi-colon.) I will say that this made a big difference in the
frequency of comma splices and in the proper use of the semi-colon.
Students felt good about themselves as writers rather than put down.
Sometimes when a student would go overboard with too many semi-colons,
we could then talk about just how close two statements were. Did they
warrant the three-quarter pause or did they need their own separate
spaces? And then we could go on to explore other ways of achieving
sentence variety...
Jane Saral
Atlanta
On Jan 11, 2008 10:59 AM, Robert Yates <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
It is nice to know that work that Jim Kenkel and I have been
doing over the past ten years might turn out to be valuable.
>>> Craig Hancock <[log in to unmask]> 01/11/08 8:47 AM >>>
. . . our students are often making sensible errors,
and it's hard to "correct" them if we don't respect their
mindset. That
also means respecting the underlying systems of the language
that they
are bringing into play.
*************
If you are interested in one proposal on what these "underlying
systems of the language" that students bring to their writing, you might
want to consult the following paper:
Kenkel, J. & Yates, R. (2003). A developmental perspective on
the relationship between grammar and text. Journal of Basic Writing,
22, 35-49.
We have another paper that deals with L2 writers. In that
paper, we try to show how not respecting the "underlying systems of the
language" leads to error corrections that will not help such students
improve.
Yates, R. & Kenkel, J.(2002). Responding to sentence-level
errors. Journal of Second Language Writing. 11, 29-47.
At the moment, we are finishing a paper that looks at a number
of non-target-like structures in ninety essays written by both native
and non-native speakers. We suggest that these non-target-like
structures (we don't like the term "error" either) are principled.
Over the past several years I have tried to bring to the
attention of the list our work. Craig has said on several occasions he
has read it.
There is something right about the following by Craig:
The most common run-on sentence, usually a commas splice, in
my
experience, is the one in which the second clause reasserts the
first
in some way, as in "My father was a popular man, everyone seemed
to
love him." I usually suggest the semi-colon for that pattern,
which I
would describe as two intonation groups (two clauses), but only
one
idea asserted. It's easiest to teach when there is a pattern,
maybe a
half dozen or so in fairly close proximity.
Of course, in most of the reading our students do, they rarely
see such punctuation. This raises a question about where these
non-standard practices come from.
A theory of language which claims our knowledge of language is
based only on input (specifically, language is a series of constructions
based on the frequency of those constructions in the input) has a
problem accounting for these non-standard punctuation practices. After
all, if language is a series of constructions, why are students
punctuation practices so deviant from most of the input they have
received?
In the papers I cited above, Jim Kenkel and I propose what those
principles might be. I think Craig's supposition is mostly right.
This is interesting because the theory of language that Craig claims is
most insightful to understanding writing is Systemic Functional
Linguistics. Halliday is quite explicit that SFL is not a theory of the
mind. It is puzzling that Craig proposes we need to respect the
underlying system of language our students bring to writing but he has a
commitment to a view of language that cannot address what those
underlying principles are.
To be specific, I know of no paper, grounded in SFL, that
attempts to explain run-ons or comma splices from SFL principles.
Craig's supposition above is not grounded in any SFL principles that I
know.
Bob Yates
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