I am a sophomore and have not yet declared a major. For the most part, I’ve taken only bac core classes, and have not had to read many scholarly articles or journals. I am, however, thinking about education and have taken a few TCE classes. Outside the regular class textbooks, I have only read short newspaper and magazine articles related to education. Before taking this class, I new nothing about grammar except what nouns, adjectives and adverbs were. Because of this, I never paid attention to any grammatical structures within the writing I read, especially nominalization.

Since enrolling in this course, I have learned a lot. I cannot tell yet if my writing style has been affected. I am more cautious when I compose sentences, careful to avoid the misuse of commas and other forms of punctuation. I know that understanding grammar should help me take more chances in using different sentence structures and punctuation, but I am still a little reluctant to change my writing style yet. I know that this class has had an influence on the way I read. I now constantly diagram sentences and find the form and function of words that I read in my books. I can’t read an entire paragraph without identifying at least one sentence pattern. I know that being constantly aware of grammar in my reading will help me improve my own writing in the future.