A critical evaluation of the Dawkins’s Article : “Teaching Punctuation as a Rhetorical Tool

This paper critically reviews Dawkins’s article entitled “Teaching Punctuation as a Rhetorical Tool”. The main argument of this Dawkins’s article is: if good writers punctuate effectively without paying any attention to handbooks rules, there should be a system worth teaching. His approach calls for teaching punctuation semantically and rhetorically. This paper reveals that there are some similarities and dissimilarities between the syntactic—based approach (handbooks) and the semantic /rhetoric—based approach. The former calls for certain rules writers have to follow, whereas the latter gives writers a great number of choices regarding how to punctuate effectively. Dawkins creates two concepts: raising and lowering. Raising is a device for gaining rhetorical effect and separation (emphasis) and lowering is a device for gaining connectedness. Dawkins’s approach is not for budding writers as it presupposes a great deal of prior knowledge of grammar—particularly the notion of a sentence; furthermore, they (budding writers) need something approaching the stability and simplicity in punctuation. Based on Dawkins’s approach, students can use punctuation properly based on their intentions taking into consideration that certain handbook rules should be administrated. Although Dawkins's article is mainly for native speakers of English context, it will be useful and productive in the EFL context. Moreover, Dawkins legitimates fragments and comma splices which are not allowed in handbooks. Such legitimacy should be brought to students’ repertoire. This paper would conclude with the finding that English teachers have to eliminate the gap between the two approaches and try to use both as much as they can while teaching punctuation.