Margin Notes

What I Was Reading

I’ve been thinking about how the Joan Didion quote, “grammar is a piano I play by ear,” applies to punctuation. In particular, the ways writers make punctuation choices to show the reader how to read the text—what to emphasize, where to pause, where to linger, where to stop. By tuning students into how the punctuation impacts their fluency, we invite them to think about how it impacts their reading experiences AND how they can be intentional in their writing and use punctuation as a guide for their readers.

When I discovered the poem A Boy Juggling a Soccer Ball by Christopher Merrill, I knew it would be a fantastic mentor text for this.

Craft Moves I Notice the Author Making

• The poem begins with a lower-case letter, which makes me think the title is actually meant to be read as the first line. When read this way, the poem is divided into two one-sentence stanzas.
• The lines are short, some with punctuation and some without, and run into each other, giving the poem an energy and pace that mirror the boy’s activity.
• The poet uses a range of punctuation to guide our reading: colon, comma, semi-colon, ellipse, dash, exclamation point, period.
• In stanza one, the semi-colon in the line “…then/ lifting it overhead until it hangs there;/ and squaring off his body…” slows down the action and enhances the image of the ball suspended in the air. It creates a sensation of slow-motion in the midst of the quick action.
• The semi-colon in the line “the bent/ blades of brown grass in summer heat;/ and relaxing, the ball slipping/ down his back…and missing his foot” works in the same way. The ellipse slows our pace down even further, building suspense in the brief moment between the lapse in his focus and losing control of the ball.
• The white space between the stanzas divides the poem into two distinct scenes or moments. It parallels the break in action when the boy loses the ball and starts again.
• One of my favorite lines from the poem is a fantastic punctuation mentor: “…until it pops into the air, is heeled/ over his head—the rainbow!–/ and settles on his extended thigh…”. When we arrive at the combination of the dashes and the exclamation point, we can’t help but pause and add the emphasis this feat deserves.

Possibilities for Writers

• Feel the fluency of your reading by walking as your read the poem out loud to yourself. Match the pace of your movements with the pace of your reading—speed up, slow down, pause, and stop. Talk with a partner about what the movement helped you notice about the poem.
• Compare this poem with a piece of prose that contains a variety of punctuation and reflect on the similarities and differences in the way you read the texts.
• Go back into something you’re working on in your writer’s notebook and revise it to reflect how you want it to be read. Think about craft moves from the poem you could try out.
• Use A Boy Juggling a Soccer Ball as a mentor. Write a few lines of your own borrowing some of the techniques you noticed in the poem.
• Reflect on punctuation choices you find in your independent reading and think about how they impact you as a reader.