You Don’t Need Formal Grammar to Teach Commas

In a post last week I argued that lessons in formal grammar aren’t helpful to students who need to sharpen their writing skills. In my opinion, usage is the way to go.

A good friend emailed me to say that she generally agreed with me, with one exception: You need grammatical theory and terminology to teach commas.

I say she’s wrong, and I’m going to use the topic of restrictive and non-restrictive clauses to make my point.

Any English teacher will tell you that these terms are a nightmare to teach. (I used to struggle with them myself until I found an easier way.)

Here’s the thing, though: you hear these sentences done correctly in conversation all the time – and the people constructing them aren’t whizzes at grammar. Read these three sentences aloud as you listen to what your voice is doing:

  1. Uncle Gary, who was a baseball star in college, can give you some tips about pitching.
  2. Cars that are parked overnight may be ticketed and towed.
  3. This assignment, which seemed impossible at first, turned out to be easy and fun.

Your voice automatically went down when you came to “who” in Sentence 1 and “which” in  Sentence 3 – and then back up near the end of the sentence. But your voice didn’t change in Sentence 2. (Amazing, isn’t it? You learned to do that as a child!)

So (radical idea!) – couldn’t students in a writing class learn to insert those commas the same way? Say the sentence aloud, listen to your voice, and insert the punctuation.

But can teachers really do that?

Yes. I did it with students for years. I had students practice speaking these sentences in groups and pairs. Then I passed out strips of paper (I always carried plenty of them with me to class) and had students work together to write and punctuate their sentences. 

It helped that I always made a point of using lots of these sentences myself as I was teaching (with an exaggerated voice change). For example: “Your homework, should you choose to accept it, is to complete Exercise 2 on page 15.”

Doesn’t it make sense to build on what students already know about language? None of this is new to them, folks. Why make writing so @#$%! difficult? Life is hard enough!

(I always used a clip from the old Superman show to teach these commas. Click here to learn more. Go to http://bit.ly/EasyCommas to download a free handout that explains commas – without grammatical jargon.)

 

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