Page 315 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

COHESION AND COHERENCE 301
In English, the fundamental purpose of punctuation marks is to divide sentences into their component parts (see chap. 4). Therefore, to a great ex- tent, the rules of punctuation follow those developed for sentence and phrase structures. It is possible to think of punctuation marks as sentence and phrase dividers or partitions that most often adhere to boundaries of sentence and phrase slots. A small number of punctuation rules depend on the meaning of sentences elements (e.g., restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses), and the semantic purposes of punctuation are usually the hardest for L2 writers to use correctly.
In teaching it is important to emphasize that the purpose of punc- tuation (and the punctuation rules) is to make the sentence easy to read by visually dividing it into component parts.
The basic punctuation rules outlined next represent the bare bones of the punctuation system in English.These rules must be learned and used in the production of academicwriting.
The Basic and Most Important Punctuation Rules
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Sentence Transitions and Prepositional Phrases
All sentence transitions at the beginnings of sentences have to be separated by a comma (e.g., However, ... Forthis reason, ...In light of this information, ...
[Transition 11,| |the rest of the sentence).
Sentence transitions in the middle of a sentence are separated by
commas on both sides (e.g., Hill's research,however,emphasizes theim- portance of...; The American democracy, on the other hand, ...).
[The beginning of the sentence II,||transition|| ,||the rest of the sentence!
• In compound sentences, two short simple sentences can be sepa- rated by a semicolon (see chap. 4 for a detailed discussion).
[Sentence #l| [jj {sentence #2|.
• If the short sentences in a compound construction are also con- joined by a transition, the transition has to be separated by a comma in all cases (e.g., Soil depletion is very costly; however, it can be prevented; Factories concentrate in cities; additionally, distribution net-
works center around major water ways).
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