Dawkins’ “Punctuation as a Rhetorical Tool” Translated into a Children’s Book and a Guideline for College Applicants on how to Punctuate College Essays

            For Writing Project 3, I will be translating and transforming Dawkins’ piece on “Teaching Punctuation as a Rhetorical tool” into a children’s book and a guideline for prospective college students and how they should be structuring their college applicant essays, particularly regarding the use of punctuation. The childrens’ book, the instructional guide, and the original piece by Dawkins will all have some similarities in form and language, but will have more differences. Their main similarity, however, will be the author’s intention, which is to educate their audiences—regardless of whether or not that audience may be much younger, slightly older, or academic—about the rules, options, and rhetorical effects of using different types of punctuation in writing.

            In his article, Dawkins begins by introducing the issue of the lack of specific rules with certain types of punctuation: no real rules exist, but there are general practices that are used that have specific effects, and commas, semi-colons, etc. all have their own uses and effects. Next, Dawkins discusses sentences and independent clauses and what they are in the language.

He provides different tables for these which include: 1) a hierarchy of functional marks, 2) the basic functions of those marks, 3) the patterns for those marks, and 4) the rules for those patterns. Next, Dawkins discusses cases involving multiple independent clauses, which concern degrees for separation between clauses (maximum, medium, minimum). Then he goes into “pedagogy,” or the ways in which the subject is taught.

            The children’s book will be a very condensed, simplified form of Dawkins’ article. There should not be more than a few sentences per page, and there should not be many pages overall. The book will have to be interactive in some sort of way, in order to draw in and interest the young readers. I am thinking about putting in pictures, but this might not be necessary. Right now, I’m imagining a pamphlet-sort of book with super-sized font on each page that introduces the topic and asks questions for the reader fairly frequently. The biggest issue will be the simplification of the material. Regarding the complexity of the material, it will be very important to provide a somewhat surface-level description of the ideas I will be sharing. The ideas will have to be explained and understood very simply. I think a good way to go about this would be to make the young readers think and have a sparked interest in the material—it will need to be interesting. I don’t think that pictures will be absolutely necessary for this, because I am not sure if they will just distract the reader. If I do provide pictures, they will need to represent and support the content well. They may just provide visual representations of the reasoning behind using different techniques for punctuation, such as the different sorts and levels of emphasis created when using a comma, semi-colon, hyphen, period, etc.

            The form of an instructional guide for prospective-college students writing college applications will have many differences than the childrens’ book of course. For starters, the instructional guide does not need to be as interesting. The guide will need to be succinct however, and the different content within will need to be easily accessible to the reader, for the reader to be able to access quickly while writing or planning the essay, for example. The guide won’t be there to educate a writing student, in the case of Dawkins piece, but it will be used as a functional guide; therefore, the guide will be much more succinct than Dawkins’ piece, which serves as more of a dissertation.

            The children’s book, the instructional guide, and Dawkins’ piece will all be similar in that they will intend to educate their audiences. The children’s book and the instructional guide will be significantly shorter than Dawkins’ piece, but for different reasons and different effects: the childrens’ book will be shorter because it will have very basic, surface-level information, that will hopefully spark interest in the reader; the instructional guide will be shorter because it will need to be succinct and to-the-point, to serve a functional purpose of guiding the readers—college applicants—through how to use the different types of punctuation in an essay, and the effects those choices will have on their specific audience.