So far my favorite piece has been "In Praise of the Humble Comma" by Pico Iyer. It's so clever! Look at the third sentence: "Add it to the present clause, and, of a sudden, the mind is, quite literally, given pause to think; take it out if you wish or forget it and the mind is deprived of a resting place." See what he did just there?? So brilliant. And then look at this part: "A world that has only periods is a world without inflections. It is a world without shade. It has a music without sharps and flats. It is a martial music. It has a jackboot rhythm. Words cannot bend and curve. A comma, by comparison, catches the gentle drift of the mind in through, turning in on itself and back on itself, reversing, redoubling and returning along the course of its own sweet river music' while the semicolon brings clauses and thoughts together with all the silent discretion of a hostess arranging guests around her dinner table." (81) So clever! "Carol and Jim, and Susan and David" is so much clearer than "Carol and Jim and Susan and David."
What makes this piece successful is that the author takes a witty tone while writing about a profoundly boring and misunderstood topic. Grammar is very difficult to teach because it is so boring. It is so boring because it never seems to apply to one's writing. In schools it's reduced to worksheets with sentences that no one would ever say. But this piece shows the effects of commas. In one of my education classes, the professor suggested that we have reading materials about our subject, so that students can explore it outside of the curriculum. Like having articles about recently archaeological findings in your history class, in addition to textbooks and such. This would be a great article to have in an English class so students could learn about the study of English without having to read Charles Dickens.
You found a lot in this and seemed to make it work for you not only as a writer but also as a teacher. Tone is everything sometimes--makes the sell, especially since grammar can be considered a technical topic and is repeated so much in one's life time. It's a relief to see fun things about it.
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I think it's really cool how you connected with this piece personally--as both student and teacher. It's so true that it's difficult to make something like grammar appealing in any way, so it takes a good writer to hit the right kind of note to make it interesting.
ReplyDeleteI had never really thought about the piece as a useful tool for teaching. I guess I thought it was a little cliche at first. The personification of commas and semi colons.. we have seen this before. But than again, if you are a writer, is it really that far off from telling the story of your life? Maybe these marks are truly invested. I have a friend with a tattoo on her hand of a small comma to remind her to pause. Makes you think.
ReplyDelete"A world that has only periods is a world without inflections." - I too loved this piece, and this was the line that was an "ah-ha" moment for me. It always interesting to me how classes I'm taking at the same time always seem to bleed together (yay liberal arts!). In another class of mine we've been focusing on the lexicon of certain eras, and how language morphs. After reading this I thought "how funny that we never brought up punctuation in my other class! I'll have to share this with my teacher". Because, it's true, punctuation colors our language, and greatly changes the meaning of a sentence.
ReplyDeleteSometimes, with these short stories, it seems like what catches my eye the most is observations that seem obvious once we read the stories, but we may have never thought of, or found the right words for, before reading them.