Bill,
  I don't think you're resurrecting a dead horse at all. I want to respond
with apologies; I want to criticize a position that includes what you
have said without the implication that you would advocate the larger
position. So this isn't an anti-Bill position, but a position on how
much we can rely on innate knowledge through exposure.
    It's very important to distinguish between "innate knowledge" of
language and innate knowledge of the conventions of punctuation,
which, as you say, have evolved over time. (It's interesting to look
at nineteenth century texts.) Here's one problem I have with this,
though: I don't think there has ever been a good study that shows a
correlation between extent of reading and punctuation competence or
one that compares this to immersion in a thoughtful program of
language exploration. Right now, the connection seems to be a leap of
faith, and it's a faith that doesn't seem confirmed by practice.
   The current logic seems to be that students learn punctuation from
exposure. When they don't, we simply need to attend to the "errors" in
the context of their happening with no need to explore what language is
and how it works beyond the immediate need to alter an aberrant
behavior. Because many students don't succeed this way, we can blame it
on the general lack of reading in their lives, or on the fact that what
they are mostly "exposed to" are not the ideal texts we are hoping they
will produce. Since there's no "scope and sequence" in the curriculum,
there is no accountability. If they can't do it, it's because they
haven't read enough. If they don't know it, it's because knowledge is
deemed unnecessary or harmful. It's never the schools' fault.
   I can look at wonderful texts and point out wonderful ways in which
writers are using their language to carry out significant purposes.
Just "exposing" my students to the text doesn't seem to work. The only
thing that holds it back is that we don't have a shared language. They
haven't been prepared and they probably won't have a chance to follow
up whatever groundwork my course creates. I feel sometimes like I'm on
a lonely island.
   Progressives point out, with some soundness, that it's wrong to assume
that native speakers need to be taught their own language. Grill and
drill approaches don't seem to carry over into writing. OK.
   I think we need to bring other "assumptions" into the light and ask if
they aren't the core of our problem. Do most students learn punctuation
from exposure? When they don't, is the lack of shared knowledge about
language an impediment to change? Is shared knowledge at least a
reasonably useful catalyst in the process? What is the cumulative
effect of diminshed knowledge about language in the public as a whole?
   Again, I think the problem is in blind acceptance of whole language as
the answer to all our problems. Adherents know it doesn't work, but
have tried to amend it as little as possible in practice. Knowledge
about language is thought of as antithetical to real reading and
writing, so we get this goofy either/or debate. We can do better.

Craig>


I may be digging up a dead horse here just to beat it, but if we're
> going to be approaching comma splices, run-ons, and fragments in
> connection with the notion of "what native speakers know about grammar,"
> it's crucial to keep in mind those particular types of problems are
> artifacts of our punctuation system, not of our language. There *are* no
> sentence fragments or run-ons in normal speech; there are highly complex
> sequences of clause units. Decisions about where to break up those
> sequences in writing, and about which punctuation mark to use for each
> division, are based on practices which have developed over the past two
> millennia among European writers. The early Romans didn't even put
> spaces between words -- a text was a big rectangle formed of lines of
> consecutive letters.
>
> This is why, for example, having a student read aloud through a paper at
> normal speed will seldom help that student spot fragments or run-ons --
> s/he will simply adopt the right intonation to make the text work,
> ignoring the punctuation. The only luck I've had with "read-aloud"
> approaches to spotting fragments is to have the student read each
> sentence in the text starting from the end and going backwards (it
> destroys the ongoing flow of the context, so the student has to evaluate
> each sentence as if it is in a new context).
>
> Even if one takes a very, very strong position on the side of innate
> knowledge of grammar, fragments and run-ons will always be outside of
> that "innate" zone. Instead, students who have read avidly will, by the
> time they are in their late teens, have developed an "innate" knowledge
> of punctuation, from exposure to the written texts where punctuation
> lives. Non-readers won't, period.
>
> Bill Spruiell
>
> Dept. of English
> Central Michigan University
>
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