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This is the first draft of my reflective assignment for my English grammar course. As a reflective assignment it's a more personal work, so don't be discouraged from reading:

As a final year undergraduate student, I have developed a writing style, and grammatical capability that have been sufficient to endure a number of difficult assessments. These assessments have tested many of my writing skills, including research, data collation, and synthesisation. However, one constant throughout this period has been my largely unprofessional grammar. While my level of grammar has certainly carried me through my university career, it has also caused the loss of a few marks here and there. The development of my grammatical capability was the result of an insufficient grammatical focus during earlier schooling, and a rapid learning process at university, involving a combination of self-teaching, and osmotic learning.

Reflecting on my earlier schooling I can recall brief, and ineffectual attempts at grammar lessons from my teachers. Adjectives are describing words; this was about the extent of the lesson. Adverbs were not really discussed in much depth. It sufficed to say that adjectives were the describing words, adverbs are the “ly” words, and verbs were the ones that had “s” where he, and she were concerned, and “ed” when it happened already. Public schooling wants you to know what to say, and how to function in society, but places little emphasis on why we speak the way we do. My subsequent years in adult tertiary preparation were spent trying to prepare me for university, and even there the emphasis was on style and content, and developing some basic ability to cite and source. Sometimes I would wonder if the teachers groaned at the sight of public school level grammar: a system they were forced to emulate, whether they wanted to or not.

The university world was a strange change of pace. Everything needed to be professional, and written to suit the formats of scholars, and wordsmiths of great stature. The first year is the most difficult. You will try to make your language flowery and expressive, and filled with adjectives stacked upon adverbs, stacked on qualifiers and interesting tangents. You wonder if starting a sentence with the word “and” is punishable with some form of incarceration, and using the dreaded perpendicular pronoun –it that must not be named- is so mighty an offence as to be worthy of immediate dismissal, and excommunication from scholarly society. The second year is generally spent slowly breaking down the misconceptions surrounding the rules of scholarly writing, and absorbing the style, content, and grammar of the many readings that each student must digest.

Now in my final year, I have developed my own style so that it will emulate the readings that help to constitute my assignments. And yet, the constant element that remains, nagging at my grades, is the less than worthy grammar. Through personal endeavours to improve my grammar, be it through commercially available grammar books or even learning the grammar of other languages, I have managed to learn what grammar is, and develop a desire to improve my own. This year will be spent learning the intricacies of English grammar, and improving my understanding of grammar, with emphasis on improving punctuation, sentence structure, and style. Each of these will require a combination of study, and frequent revision to ensure a synthesis of these concepts with my own personal writing attitude.