| Punctuation makes the written language
intelligible. It does the job, on the page, of the changes of pitch, pace and
rhythm which make it possible to understand speech. Unsurprisingly, therefore, a
requirement for some knowledge of how to punctuate makes an early appearance in
an English curriculum. The trouble is, that necessary though punctuation is, the task of teaching it to children is considerably more challenging than it might appear. For example, it is possible that to instruct children about writing in sentences by telling them about full stops and capital letters is to court frustration and failure. The notion of the sentence as a statement—a free- standing chunk of information—is something that children come to gradually. As written work grows longer and more complicated, so the perception of sentence increases. Good teachers will, in their teaching of early writing, watch for the child's ability to compose in sentences, and then point out how the use of punctuation will define them more clearly. So, where, in all this, comes the mechanical definition of a sentence—that it needs a verb, for example? The pragmatic answer is that it comes nowhere at all. Adult writers do not, on the whole, look back at their sentences to make sure they contain verbs. We all surely feel our sentences intuitively. Most of the time, to be sure, they will contain verbs. Occasionally, though, they may not—and where's the harm? What is certain is that you cannot possibly use the grammatical rule as a tool with which to teach a seven-year-old about sentence-writing. The child can be {{U}}nudged{{/U}} and helped towards writing in sentences, but on the whole he will not do it until he is ready. The point is that punctuation is an aid which the writer brings into play to illuminate an already formed idea. Before you can learn the punctuation, you have to know what you want to punctuate. Thus you teach capital letters, full stops, question marks and exclamation marks to a child who is already writing sentences, questions and exclamations. The development of a child's writing will always be a step ahead of the punctuation, and to reverse the process in response, say, to the short-term demands of a curriculum is to put later progress at risk. |