I want you to read a collection of sentences I gathered from a book called Brothers and Keepers by John Wideman. The book is a memoir about Wideman’s relationship to his brother. Wideman and his brother are both Black but lived very different lives, growing up in different places. Wideman spends the memoir talking with his brother, who is in prison, to get closer to him but it also is a way to think about his family history and larger societal issues of race and class in the U.S.
Wideman’s style uses a lot of different punctuation in interesting ways. So, I thought it might be good practice for you to read through some of his sentences and to think about which uses of punctuation stand out to you.
- The previous summer, 1980, a prisoner, Leon Patterson, had been asphyxiated in his cell.
- People in Homewood often ask: You said that to say what?
- Six years later my brother was in prison, and when he began the story of his troubles with Garth’s death, a circle completed itself; Robby was talking to me, but I was still on the outside, looking in.
- The hardest habit to break, since it was the habit of a lifetime, would be listening to myself listen to him. That habit would destroy any chance of seeing my brother on his terms; and seeing him in his terms, learning his terms, seemed the whole point of learning his story.
- Because Homewood was self-contained and possessed such a strong personality, because its people depended less on outsiders than they did on each other for so many of their most basic satisfactions, they didn’t notice the net settling over their community until it was already firmly in place. Even though the strands of the net–racial discrimination, economic exploitation, white hate and fear–had existed time out of mind, what people didn’t notice or chose not to notice was that the net was being drawn tighter, that ruthless people outside the community had the power to choke the life out of Homewood, and as soon as it served their interests would do just that.
- The borrowed pen and paper (I was not permitted into the lounge with my own) were necessary props. I couldn’t rely on memory to get my brother’s story down and the keepers had refused my request to use a tape recorder, so there I was.
Task
After reading through these sentences above, comment below on 2 different uses of punctuation and how it had a rhetorical effect.
Think to the last page where we talked about different punctuation is giving different lengths of time for pausing.
Why would certain lengths and types of pauses have a rhetorical effect? Why use punctuation in the way it was used, why not just use a bunch of simple sentences that end in periods? Why not a comma rather than a colon? Etc. Try to think that through by throwing out some ideas as you read and react to the above sentences.
To comment, mention:
- the sentence by its number in the list
- the type of punctuation for both usages
- what you thought was rhetorically significant about that use of punctuation for both usages
After commenting below, click on the button below to continue.
1. Six years later my brother was in prison, and when he began the story of his troubles with Garth’s death, a circle completed itself; Robby was talking to me, but I was still on the outside, looking in.
2. Commas and semicolon.
3. Commas was able to make the sentence have emphasis, if commas were not used and the context was written in simple sentences. There would be no emphasis behind the words. As for the semicolon, it connects two different thoughts into one, this is probably done in order bring more emphasis to the whole thing.
1) Sentence 1. (The previous summer, 1980, a prisoner, Leon Patterson, had been asphyxiated in his cell.)
2) Commas and a period.
3) The commas were used as a seemingly mysterious yet concise way of elaborating on the time period and the prisoner’s name through appositive phrases. The period, in the end, is used to complete the thought.
1. The previous summer, 1980, a prisoner, Leon Patterson, had been asphyxiated in his cell.
2. The sentence used commas
3. By using many commas the sentence was slowed down and almost felt like the author was using them to peel the sentence layer by layer.
I want to talk about both the sentences in excerpt five. Both sentences are extremely long and riddled with commas. This gave me the sense of being in the author’s head as he thought, it felt like a train of thoughts, moving too rapidly to stop for a real break. The only time he used a period in the excerpt is to reflect back on what they just said, again how one might feel thoughts race through their brains.
1. Sentence 4
2. commas and semicolon
3. Makes you slow down, the author wants you to really understand what’s happening in the story
1.The previous summer, 1980, a prisoner, Leon Patterson, had been asphyxiated in his cell.
2. Only Commas
3. The sentence was weird because I felt like there actually no need for so many commas or any commas at all. But the short pauses in between the words made it seem like the author wanted you to remember them as important info.
1. The previous summer, 1980, a prisoner, Leon Patterson, had been asphyxiated in his cell.
2. This sentence used commas.
3. In my opinion in this small sentence there were way to many commas used for no reason. There probably should’ve been one maybe two in this one sentence.
1. Sentence
2. This sentence has a colon.
3. The colon makes you think that there is something being listed coming up or an example of something.
The previous summer, 1980, a prisoner, Leon Patterson, had been asphyxiated in his cell
commas
The commas give more information as to who and when
In sentences 1 and 6, punctuation is used to add more detail into the writing. Commas are used in sentence 1 to give a better description of what the writer is talking about, in this case being the time period, name, and place. In sentence 6, parenthesis are used to emphasize the reason that the pen and paper were borrowed.