Reading Response #10 (Dawkins)

          "Teaching Punctuation as a Rhetorical Tool" is an article written by John Dawkins (for students who want to know about punctuation rules, or fellows who take grammar seriously) that points out the hypocrisy "manuals of style and college handbooks" (140) have in regards to punctuation rules. To Dawkins, punctuation is "one of the 'mechanics' of writing, after all," (140) and as such, good writers have no trouble breaking the rules, simply because "the punctuation rules in handbooks and style manuals are not sacred text." To response, Dawkins proposes that punctuation is really formed by its' usefulness, and writers aware of this "punctuate according to their intended meaning, their intended emphasis," (141) so the "principles" (142) really depend on how urgent the function of the each single independent clauses express themselves, which ranges from "hierarchy of functional punctuations marks" (where questions marks have a maximum "degree of separation" and commas have the minimum) (142) that can either be raised or lowered, a pattern of "pre-clausal, post-clausal, and medial" (143),  or to "Degrees of Separation Between Clauses" (147) (where the use of those mark depend on how much 'meaning' can be clarified). If successful, Dawkins says that thinking punctuation of that mindset will reveal a fundamental principle to any writer: "writing is thinking." (153)

          Similar to Sarah Allen's "The Inspired Writer vs. The Real Writer," Dawkins convince the reader that the preconceptions of punctuation/reading, taught in a setting that same reader might not have a particular interest in, only further frustrates the abilities to get himself to actually read and write, and instead proposes ideas that the concept in hand is about as flexible as the writer wants it to be. For Dawkins, it was about looking into the principles themselves and finding out that punctuation entirely depends on the importance of specific independent clauses, while Allen believes that the emotional resonance of the self can entirely depends on how much work that self is willing to work to arrive at writing nirvana; the writer someone wants to be against the true writer within in other words. To simplify, both writers agree that following predetermined concepts/rules will result in personal frustration, but both arrive at different conclusions to make student writers be themselves--with Dawkins in favor of textual objectively against Allen's emotional subjectivity.

          To use Dawkin's principles as an example, allow me to take these two sentences:

• My sister's treehouse made a great place to play with her friends.
• The treehouse was made of wood scraps and cardboard. 

And write them in three different ways to serve his idea for some of his ideas...

1. Made of woodscraps and cardboard, my sister's treehouse made a great place to play with her friends.
2. My sister's treehouse--made of wood scraps and cardboard--was a great place to play with her friends. 
3. My sister's treehouse made a great place to play with her friends, since it was made of wood scraps and cardboard.     

Notice that sentence two emphasizes the sentence about wood scraps and cardboard, while the two still uses commas to arrive at this point. This is intentional; in the second sentence, I wanted that sentence of wood scraps to stand out for the minimum degree of separation of the commas of the other two sentences, simply because if the wood scarps weren't mention, then it would simply be an ordinary treehouse in a textual sense, and the sentence would simply focus on how much of a great place it is. Now that the materials are mentioned, the treehouse suddenly has this security to it the other two sentences misses, all because using a, according to Dawkins, medium degree of separation, the reader now has a good idea of what exactly the treehouse looks like, resulting in, hopefully, a clearer picture of the treehouse itself in the reader's mind. 

Questions for Discussion and Journaling 

           According to Dawkins, "Fragments and comma splices, violations of the coordinate clause and elliptical coordinate clause rules for commas, and inconsistencies in use of the comma with introductory word, phrase, and clause--these and other failures to follow the rules are frequent enough to raise questions about the rules themselves." (140-141) Going by this sentence, I'm assuming that to Dawkins, Punctuation, under the handbook rules he's against, consists of sentences that are not only complete, but has a beginning, middle, and end, along with forming one under it own terms. This too includes commas, where two separate independent sentence cannot join under a comma, or that the structure he mentions must follow a consistent rule, or risk muddling the intent of one of the sentences. 

Applying an Exploring Ideas

          Using an article called "Warhol's Self-Portrait as a Toilet," let's look at three sentences from piece about Andy Warhol and why he was what he was...

1. "The mysterious image gets at something important about Warhol that I didn’t quite hit on in my Newsweek review: Every object he made, and almost every action he took, was in some sense about him – but not because they reveal anything about the man himself or about his creative persona."
2. "There’s no winkling out intention or meaning; Warhol’s stuff, like natural stuff, is simply there, in its ineluctable strangeness and removal from us."
3. "If an umbrella and a sewing machine really were to come together on an operating table, without anyone there to arrange the meeting, you’d be faced with something truly Warholian."     

And now let's see what happens when I switch the punctuation around...

1. "The mysterious image gets at something important about Warhol, that I didn’t quite hit on, in my Newsweek review--Every object he made (and almost every action he took) was in some sense about him, but not because they reveal anything about the man himself, or about his creative persona."
2. "There’s no winkling out intention or meaning. Warhol’s stuff--like natural stuff--is simply there; in its ineluctable strangeness and removal from us."
3. "If an umbrella and a sewing machine really were to come together on an operating table--without anyone there to arrange the meeting--you’d be faced with something truly Warholian."

Has anything changed? No, not necessarily. Yes, some parts of the sentence is now empathized, due to the nature of a dash ("like natural stuff," "without anyone there to arrange the meeting"), the wording is the still the same, and some parts are not as important anymore ("and almost every action he took), but all this does is support Dawkins' purpose: The more one understand the hierarchical system, then the consequence leads to sentences that raises, or lowers, the importance of that individual part of the sentence.
       
Source: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/09/18/andy-warhol-at-the-metropolitan-museum-is-the-daily-pic-by-blake-gopnik.html

Meta Moment

         So why did my teacher wants me to read Dawkins' article, where punctuation is rhetorical rather than conditional? Well, as a student himself, he understands that we, as undergraduates, are under this mindset that punctuation is something that can be easily crafted; the more we use it and understand its' rules and regulations, the better "writers" we would become. Our teacher, Mr. V, knows that this way of thinking will particularity leave all of us students, especially himself, into this state of frustration, where the content of the material itself doesn't actually matter unless we, the students, learn our trade until we understand something (and that's just ignoring the different set of rules each set of writing models use). So, by using Dawkins' article, we can gain in knowledge that, quite frankly, it doesn't really amount to anything; all our favorite authors break the rules all the time, so why bother? After all, as long as we writers (like myself) can "punctuate according to their intended meaning," (141), then we shouldn't fret if we suddenly forget to put a semicolon and replace it with an ordinary comma.
       
          All in all, I find it rather conforming that, yes, punctuation is an important tool to learn as a student, it's not necessarily the most important tool to think about. I'm not sure if I necessarily share Dawkins' annoyance with handbook rules of writing, since we would then dismiss rules that could lead into even more interesting stylistic choice of future writers (it might be interesting if there was a famous that did follow by the books, or at least, took the writings of those who created these rules seriously), but Dawkins' main argument for rhetoric grammar at least alerted me of alternative ways of approaching grammar, so I say consider that to be a small victory to my education.