Playful punctuation in primary children’s narrative writing

ABSTRACT

Framed within the fields of applied linguistics and language play, the writing of three attainment groups of 9–11-year-old children was used to investigate their use of ludic (playful) punctuation in the composition of an imaginative narrative. The scripts were from a larger repeat-design study of writing development that addressed a range of linguistic features. It became apparent that the scripts contained a range of language play features, including the use of ludic punctuation, and these were then systematically studied. A total of 71 stories were analysed to identify and categorise the playful punctuation that the children used in this writing task. A range of ludic punctuation was found, most notably in the use of quotation marks, exclamation marks and question marks. In contrast, the asterisk, interrobang, underlining, brackets and dash were used infrequently. There were clear differences between the attainment groups in the content and range of these uses. The findings indicate that 10–11 year-old children find that narrative writing offers a range of opportunities for creative and playful uses of punctuation, even though they were not prompted to do this. The findings also suggest that such uses – like language play as a whole – warrant further investigation.

KEYWORDS:

• Children’s writing
• narrative
• playful punctuation

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Nicholas Rougeux for his kind permission to reproduce the material in Figure 2, which is derived from https://www.c82.net/work/?id=347

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability

All original scripts have been anonymised and archived.

Ethical statement

We confirm that the research presented in this article was carried out in line with the extant Ethical Guidelines of the British Educational Research Association.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The parent study was funded by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council, RES-000-22-1050;

Notes on contributors

Andrew Burrell

Andrew Burrell is a primary school teacher and an Associate of the UCL Institute of Education. He has published extensively on children's writing and language play.

Roger Beard

Roger Beard is Emeritus Professor of Primary Education at the UCL Institute of Education and has published widely on Literacy Education. In 2019 he was elected to the Hall of Fame of the Literacy Research Association in the USA.