Children as Designers of Texts: Punctuating Persuasive Writing

Framed within literacy education and applied linguistics, children’s playful punctuation is considered within a paradigm of ‘writing as design’. Drawing particularly on the work of Sharples (1999), the article examines data from a repeat design study of 9–11 year old children tackling a persuasive description task. The data showed evidence of children making plans, setting goals and satisfying constraints to fulfil communicative effect. As well as being testament to children’s ingenuity in using punctuation in creative ways, the findings have implications for how the writing process is conceptualised and for how writing is taught.