Dawkins questions

Discussion and Journaling

1  I think the conceptions that Dawkins is challenging is that you don't have to write by only using the "rules" of writing that we have always been taught. That you can use punctuation as a powerful tool to express things in your writing and if you followed the rules of what you are not supposed to do with punctuation as taught it would be a lot harder to give meaning to writing. You can be a good writer without following the text book of rules that is forced on us from the beginning. He argues that you can take a comma out when old school writers say it should be there or put a comma in a sentence and they say it;s unacceptable and still be a good writer and give your writing meaning.

5  Before reading Dawkin's I had no idea that it was possible to write outside the "rules" of punctuation. I did not realize the many ways you can use punctuation to change the meaning of a sentence. We  are always taught that a sentence is a sentence a comma has a place and  period has a place and that's it. After reading Dawkin's I realized you can do things like "raising" to gain emphasis on a sentence. In old school writing this would not have been heard of and certainly not acceptable. I also thought it was interesting to see that you can use dashes and semi-colons in writing, although I am not quite sure how to use them.

Applying and Exploring

I remember being told in high school not to use run-on sentences and commas together. Commas should only be used in certain places and they should not be used to make a sentence longer. A sentence should not go on forever.

A letter  to my past teacher would probably say something like this.Writing would have been easier if we could have chosen how we wanted our sentences to read and if we could have been taught how to use punctuation instead of what not to do with it. You can use punctuation to give different meaning. For example you can put a comma in a sentence you can put more emphasis on a certain part of it. I believe this is called raising from commas to periods. You get more emphasis out of the sentence then if you just stopped with a period. The way  we were taught in high school, this would have been considered a run-on sentence.