I think Paul Doniger's wonderful observations about Dicken's raise the
larger question - is punctuation "grammar"?

There are, of course, at least two kinds of grammar - the grammar that keeps
us from writing "wrinkles spots and laundry out get hopefully will" and the
grammar that stops us from writing "we is tired so we tooked a naps" and I
think we could find dozens of definitions or distinctions in between.

But, strictly speaking, is how you punctuate "grammar" or is it just an
artificial and completely invented way of trying to organize a language
which was originally developed to be oral so that it makes sense when
written (or is it something in between)?

If we accept that punctuation is a made-up thing, standardized by printers
and varying somewhat from nation to nation, can't its conventions be both
flexible and fallible? And, to get back to one of the original questions, is
seventh grade really too early for writer's to understand that everything in
writing is not always black and white, correct or incorrect?

Maureen Fitzpatrick
Associate Professor, English
Johnson County Community College

 -----Original Message-----
From:   Paul E. Doniger [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent:   Friday, June 29, 2001 4:59 PM
To:     [log in to unmask]
Subject:        Re: comma splice

Here's a poser for all:

The recent discussion regarding comma splices reminds me of an interesting
literary reference. In Dickens's _A Tale of Two Cities_, the opening
paragraph is punctuated as a single sentence with each item in the list of
antitheses separated by a comma. I wonder how all we would explain this to
the students who would raise (and, in my experience, HAVE raised) the
comment that it's a "run-on sentence." Would you say that all these items
are elements in a list? Wouldn't you want to separate each antithesis group
with end punctuation: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness." and so forth?

How would you explain the dash (is it an em-dash?) that separates the list
from the main sentence? What would each of you identify as the main subject
and predicate (I would probably say, "The core sentence of the whole
paragraph is 'authorities insisted', which is also one of the main thematic
elements of the story."). How, finally, would you deal with the inevitable
complaint that the paragraph is not a paragraph, but rather a sentence?

And then ... which one of us would be so rash as to correct Dickens?

Here's a good example, I think, of an opportunity to teach grammar and
literature together.

Paul E. Doniger

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