Presents a functional description of punctuation as a delimiter of words, sentences, and paragraphs, and as a semantic and extralinguistic indicator. (AM)

Discusses the use of the comma in Spanish and gives examples of its use in Spanish literature. (NCR)

Demonstrates the role of punctuation in relation to the syntax, communicative value, and semantics of the French sentence. (AM)

Discusses the uses of the comma in Spanish and shows a poem that can be interpreted in different ways with different punctuation. (NCR)

Analyzes the nature of punctuation, its functions (syntactic, suprasegmental, and semantic), its role in written language, and punctuation as grapheme. (AM)

Suggests that by reading aloud, students may come to a greater awareness of the three subsystems of the English punctuation system--inclusion, sentence stops, and sentence marks. (HOD)

"Writeability" is concerned with helping writers and editors produce materials on easier readability levels. A major input of most readability formulas is vocabulary difficulty. One way to increase readability is to use simple vocabulary or shorter words since word frequency studies show that more common words are shorter. The other…

Describes calls to a grammar hot line about usage, grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Concludes that many people besides educators and professional writers care about exact and accurate language usage. (EL)

This concluding article in a series concerning the use of the comma in Spanish gives specific examples of its use from Spanish literature. Concluding remarks outline the major purposes of the comma. (NCR)

The punctuation system presented in this paper has explanatory power insofar as it explains how good writers punctuate. The paper notes that good writers have learned, through reading, the differences among a hierarchy of marks and acquired a sense of independent clauses that allows them to use the hierarchy, along with a reader-sensitive notion…

Readers are "dumb" because they are not privy to the mind and intentions of the writer; and the failure of the unsuccessful writer is a failure to forecast what it is going to be like to be a dumb reader of the document. Sample sentences from students' writing illustrate the following types of writing problems, which force the reader to examine…

Describes a teaching method that uses Molly Bloom's soliloquy from James Joyce's "Ulysses" to teach punctuation to freshman writing students. Argues that the assignment helps students discover their power as orderers. (EL)

Basic writers often experience difficulties when trying to articulate ideas in writing that are more specific, systematic, and fully developed than their speech. The writers must learn how to put their thinking into the appropriate forms and expressions necessary to address an academic audience. Noting that the natural working of the human mind…

Reviews over 50 textbooks grouped into three categories: (1) workbooks; (2) sentence style books, most of which use sentence combining as the fundamental type of exercise; and (3) copy books, which are used by directly copying passages with signals for particular changes. (EL)

Inexperienced writers, including both basic writers and learning disabled, commit errors that often follow a discernible pattern due to applying erroneous or incomplete rules. Techniques for teaching editing skills are described, including textual analyses of students' writing, interviews with students, structuring the editing task, and providing…