For a dead horse, it's awfully lively!

Of course, you're right - there's nothing about punctuation that a native 
speaker automatically knows, but a "native reader" (how 'bout that for a 
concept?) will have picked up from the act of reading.  I don't want to take 
this "native speaker" idea too far.

Geoff


>From: "Spruiell, William C" <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar              
><[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: knowledge about language
>Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2006 15:37:29 -0400
>
>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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