Page 141 - Literacy in the New Media Age

130 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

nouns derived from full clausal structures.) Here the point is that in the passage
from most speech-like to most writing-like forms, textual/linguistic material has
undergone intense ordering and restructuring, the marks of which are invisible in
the reordered structure. Here punctuation in the narrower sense does not appear at
all. The nominalisation ‘the recent call for taxation reform’ is an instance of a
new noun(-like)/word-element having been formed syntactically from an
‘original’ form that might have been something like ‘someone recently called for
a reform’. This new element functions as a subject noun-phrase, and one does
not have to work very hard to imagine social-political circumstances in which
‘call for taxation’ could become a noun; certainly ‘taxation call’ seems a very
plausible candidate for elevation to the dictionary.
If the possibility of judgement of syntactic and then cognitive kinds existed in
the case of the first sentence, it exists no less here. This writer’s sentences show
accomplished syntactic ordering, and from there it is an equally short step to the
judgement about conceptual (cognitive) ordering – ‘sophisticated’ might be the
word used. So before I pass from the discussion of these two examples I should
mention the issue of gender and its possible role here. Might the first writer have
been resisting the move to syntactic/conceptual integration? And if so, why? The
first sentence was written by a young man, and the second was written by a
young woman. The move to integration is a move to the conventional form,
towards the accepted and the valued form. But it is also a move away from the
forms of speech through which the young man might be maintaining relations of
solidarity with his male peer group. And from that perspective it might be the
move towards a group with which he does not wish to show solidarity, either in
terms of gender or of class.
The first essay received a grade of 12/20, and the second a grade of 18/20.
Several teachers of economics to whom I showed the two essays judged them to
be equally competent in terms of the ‘knowledge’ displayed. Choosing your spot
on the line between speech-like and writing-like writing has its rewards and its
penalties, though in quite different domains.
In an attempt to understand punctuation, one question is, where does our
interest in ordering processes and resources begin and end? Which of the many
means of ordering should we treat as punctuation? And which of these are
devices for framing? The young woman’s sentence shows little punctuation, but
very strong framing.
For any written utterance we can construct a quasi-history of its generation.
The following list shows one for the sentence we have been looking at in the
third example above. It is of course a hypothesis only. The form actually used by
the author is shown in bold.

1 [that rejection casts us out to sea] clause 1;
[through someone asking the question] clause 2;
[‘what might that relationship be?’] clause 3;