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> The general case in the argument, "people can't read what
> they can't write," is obviously false. People who are incompetent
> at writing, spelling, and punctuation are often perfectly capable of
reading.
Bruce wrote:
> You're assuming that a piece of punctuation is the same as a
> word. it's not. People can puzzle out the pronunciation of a word with
> considerable success and often they can get some sense of the meaning
> from the context. However, punctuation is meta-communication;
> it doesn't convey information in itself, but tells you how to parse the
> communication. If you don't know the meta-communication, it's difficult
> to understand exactly how it's dividing up the sentence. Many people
> won't try.
You don't understand my meaning. When I talk about "people being capable of
reading," I mean that they can be trusted to grasp the point that the writer
was trying to convey. The use of punctuation is by no means outside this
process. Nothing "meta" about it: if you screw up the punctuation,
communication suffers.
I doubt very much that the average reader is unaffected by the fancier
symbols: em dashes, ellipses, semicolons, colons, footnote symbols, single
quotes for quotations within quotations, three asterisks setting off breaks
in narration, or square brackets [Nathan Hale's last words were, "I regret
that I have but one asterisk for my country."]. Not only have most readers
encountered these in school, but their function is reasonably self-evident
from context. Heck, the more black ink a piece of punctuation has, the
stronger the break it signifies. It ain't rocket science.
No doubt some readers are really, really incapable -- though I find it hard
to believe that they will stumble over punctuation. My experience with kids
at the early-reader stage is that they skip right over unfamiliar
punctuation. It doesn't seem actively harmful in any way.
> >Remember, reading level reflects the subject matter more
> than it reflects
> >your writing abilities
> >
> Granted, complex subject matter is more likely to have its
> own jargon, but what's your argument? I think I disagree with it, but,
> even if I'm do, I'm curious why you would say this.
My point is that child-sized sentences are okay for child-sized concepts.
Many concepts need to be explained with grown-up sentences, using grown-up
punctuation.
For example, the physical installation of any given piece of network
hardware is generally a straightforward task that can be written up
successfully at a low grade level. On the other hand, to use an oft-quoted
example, world events are a web of complex issues that, when written up at a
low grade level (which is what the media generally does), come out as
pathetically garbled oversimplifications that are rarely worth reading at
all. The same would be true of any other issue involving lots of
simultaneous and conflicting considerations, from choosing medications for
high blood pressure to choosing the computers and network hardware that goes
into a server room.
