While writing, over the years I have developed a relationship with punctuation and grammar. I have seen my writing improve by leaps and bounds, yet during the writing process I keep finding myself questioning the length of my sentences and paragraphs. My use of commas is always justified, but i feel that sometimes my use of commas creates sentences that drag on.  I am looking forward to learning a new stylistic approach to using commas. I am also looking forward to learning more about other punctuation that isn't as common like semicolons and colons, along with the use of Em and En dashes. Breaking down sentences and analyzing each component will be interesting in comparison to French grammar, which I have also been studying. I have gained an affinity for dialogue and the way different authors infuse their own styles. For example in my creative writing class I was asked to read a short story that followed a couple during a dispute over who would have the baby. The author chose not to put quotations around the dialogue. I think the author wanted the story to feel a bit faster paced and more like a real argument and the use of "he said" and "she said" along with quotation marks would have made the text feel more rigid and constricted. 

 During my writing process I notice that I will go back over my work and constantly break down sentences and paragraphs. This is mostly due to my fear of run on sentences, along with my love for commas. I have found that commas are very useful in any piece of writing, but can be dangerous to teach. I am a tutor in the writing center and I occasionally find myself asking coworkers for assistance when helping ESL students with commas. Last semester I took a syntax class (English 444), which was very interesting and proved to be quite challenging focused on the contents of the sentence like phonetically null components. I am excited for a change of pace and focus on punctuation in this class. Which brings me to the next part of this class that I will be looking forward to going over the more uncommon pieces of punctuation and how to correctly use them. I would like to be able to incorporate more punctuation marks in order to increase my sentence variety and also to improve my creativity while working on other pieces of writing like screenplays and storytelling. The use of punctuation can do so much from creating suspense to bringing closure. I would also like to use punctuation to enhance my academic writing. I am worried that I will go overboard will all of the new punctuation at first, I’m sure the writing center will set me straight. I think that learning the ins and outs of punctuation in this class will help me improve as a tutor and grow as a teacher. Overall I am looking forward to improving my writing skills, through creative use of punctuation and grammatical rules.