Page 134 - Literacy in the New Media Age

MEANING AND FRAMES 123

notion of the sentence in the early years of their learning to write. It seemed to
me then, and I have not changed my mind since, that punctuation can give one
kind of insight into a writer’s sense of their place in the world, whether as a child
or as an adult.
The elements which a writer establishes through the framing of punctuation
are a precise indication of how she or he parcels up the conceptual world, putting
their particular order on it. I felt, and am still convinced, that this approach is
both more useful and more defensible than the approach that sees punctuation as
a vacuous enterprise which must nevertheless be taught, learned and displayed,
by rôte – with or without the accent circumflex. In the case of child writers I felt
that their punctuation shows them at work with astonishing acuity and astuteness
about the world, shows them struggling to make real sense, their sense, of the
difficult matter of meaning. And I certainly did not think that it displayed
incompetence in the use of an adult system, as is too often and too readily
assumed.
When children learn to write, they move from the textual/syntactic structures
of speech – the simple linking of clauses, in a chain-like manner – to the gradual
inclusion of several clauses in a more complex unit, the sentence. Their
punctuation shows an intense preoccupation with the characteristics of this
complex unit: what is to be included in the sentence, what is not to be in it. The
motivations for their decisions to put clauses together in one unit tend to be
clearly textual motivations: what makes sense in terms of the overall coherence,
structure and needs of their text. This childish sense has led me to see the
sentence as always a textual rather than as a syntactic unit – even in the writing of
a fully practised adult writer. The text derives its organisation from the social
practices in which it is formed and of which it is a part; sentences are elements of
these practices, and are motivated in their content, their form and their inter-
connections by the coherence of these practices.
Treating punctuation as a textually rather than as a primarily syntactically
motivated matter involves looking with a much broader span than traditional or
contemporary reference-grammars tend to do: they do treat punctuation in terms
of the syntax of the sentence and of its internal structures.
Punctuation is a semiotic resource, available for making social meanings. So
for me one question is, ‘Who is punctuation for?’ And of course, ‘What is
(counted as) punctuation?’ Some of the topics I wish to focus on are the relations
of speech and writing, textual and cross-textual structures, syntax and lexis,
cognitive and conceptual issues, and interpersonal and social issues. I will
analyse a number of examples, taken from writings (and in one case, the speech)
of many different kinds of writers: an accomplished male academic writer of
high status, the poet John Milton, a seventeenth-century woman pamphleteer, a girl
in primary school, a young man and a young woman at the end of secondary
school, a female ‘middle manager’, and, in the case of the spoken extract, a
woman trade-unionist. But I will also look at punctuation as framing across
modes, on the pages of magazines and on a website.