Good Punctuation Lets the Reader Hear & Feel the Language

I'm linking a couple very well written, smart articles recently posted to SSRN by Gerald Lebovits of St. John's School of Law. These articles are about "legal punctuation," but in fact are really about any punctuation and written in a way that my students might find useful. I expect I will use these next semester as readings. My favorite insight of Lebovits is his idea that good punctuation lets you hear, feel, and understand language. I don't recall ever reading it said like that in any of these FYW textbooks I've been using. I generally believe that FYW students are not really used to the idea that their writing makes their reader "feel" things. For one, you have to have empathy in order to understand that, or at least have gone through some periods of de-centering in your life. It's not that FYW students haven't done that, it's just that some of them are young. However, the average age of my students is 28. I also think practice matters a lot, because if you haven't experienced the reaction a reader can have to your writing, it's hard to explain. If you don't read a lot, you yourself don't have experience "feeling" things based on someone else's writing. So you're missing the needed perspective in order the generate the feelings you want to generate in others, in your own writing. But, in the textbooks I've been using, punctuation is always presented as a set of rules. He has some examples where he moved the punctuation around in order to emphasize different things in a sentence. These articles might be very useful for anyone teaching writing.

Lebovits, Gerald,Do's, Don'ts, and Maybes: Legal Writing Punctuation -- Part I(February 1, 2008). New York State Bar Association Journal, Vol. 80, No. 2, p. 64, February 2008. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1296061

Lebovits, Gerald,Do's, Don'ts, and Maybes: Legal Writing Punctuation - Part II(March/April 2008). New York State Bar Association, Vol. 80, p. 64, March/April 2008. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1296074

Lebovits, Gerald,Do's, Don'ts, and Maybes: Legal Writing Punctuation - Part III(May 1, 2008). New York State Bar Association, Vol. 80, p. 64, May 2008 . Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1296126