Tuesday, November 13, 2012

A soundtrack for comma splices

Yes, my freshman composition students arrived in class to find a Pink Floyd video on the screen and music blaring on the classroom speakers. So sue me already.  It had to be done.

Every semester when I distribute the infamous comma splice handout with the words "Another Brick in the Wall" emblazoned across the top--the handout that compares sentences to bricks, fragments to crumbling bricks, and comma splices to toothpaste squeezed in where the mortar ought to be--I hear a soundtrack furnished by Pink Floyd in the back of my mind, but many students don't hear it because they don't know the song and don't get the allusion.

So I showed the video with its brutal schoolmaster beating all the creativity out of his charges and inspiring them to burn down the school, and then I told my own little charges that I'm happy to flog them into understanding of comma splices because, clearly, oppression produces poetry and spurs students to creative action. And then I distributed the infamous handout: Another Brick in the Wall.

In my defense, I did suggest that burning down the building might be a bad idea, no matter how much they hate semicolons.

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