Module 3 Professional Development Writing Assignment Guide

The four parts are not four unrelated exercises — parts three and four are the rule book for part one, and noticing that changes how you work. Part three asks you to define their, there and they're; its and it's; your and you're. Part four asks when apostrophes are used and when avoided. Then part one hands you two passages in which precisely those errors have been planted: a "their is a risk", a "there mortality rates", possessive apostrophes attached to plain plurals. The assignment is testing whether you can state a rule and then apply it to text, which is a different skill from doing either alone. Doing part one last, after you have written out the rules, is the efficient order and it shows in the accuracy. It also gives you something to say in part one beyond a clean copy, since you can name the rule you just defined as you apply it.

Read the correction instruction closely, because it is narrower than it first appears: correct all errors in capitalization, spelling and punctuation, and divide the passage into appropriate paragraphs. Grammar is not on the list, and the paragraphing instruction is a separate requirement that students routinely skip because it does not look like an error. Both passages arrive as undivided blocks and both have obvious break points — in the first, each family member's reaction; in the second, the shift from small defects to larger ones to postoperative care. Marking those divisions is a whole instruction satisfied in about thirty seconds, and leaving it undone is the cheapest mark in the assignment to lose. If you are unsure where a break belongs, look for the point where the subject of the discussion changes, which in both passages is unusually clear.

The first passage is built almost entirely out of sentence fragments, and they follow one pattern worth naming. Each is a subordinate clause or a participial phrase punctuated as though it were a sentence — "Because, of course, everything would run so much more smoothly.", "Telling them which days to telephone…", "By avoiding the situation.", "So that he would never be bored." The repair in every case is punctuation rather than rewriting: attach the fragment to the sentence it belongs to, usually with a comma, and the fragment disappears. That matters because the instruction limits you to punctuation, capitalization and spelling, so a repair that reworks the wording has exceeded what was asked. Where a fragment genuinely cannot be attached without changing meaning, a full stop and a minimal subject is the smallest legitimate repair, and worth flagging as a judgement call.

The capitalization errors in the first passage are the more interesting half and they are of three different kinds, which is almost certainly deliberate. A proper noun is left lowercase — a hospital's name appears as "r.j. smith hospital". A common noun is capitalised as though it were a title, when a profession only takes a capital as part of a name before a person. And the first-person pronoun appears as a lowercase "i" inside quoted speech, which is the one error nobody defends but that people miss when reading quickly. Naming the rule behind each correction, rather than silently fixing it, is worth doing if your instructor expects to see understanding rather than a clean copy. A short annotated list beside the rewrite handles this without disturbing the corrected passage, which the instruction asks you to produce cleanly.

The second passage is a different problem and needs a different eye. Its errors are run-on sentences and comma splices — clauses fused where a full stop or semicolon belongs, most visibly where the treatment sentence runs straight into the next statement without any punctuation at all. There are homophone errors of exactly the kind part three asks you to define, a misspelling of millimetres, a "too" where "to" belongs, and "patience" where "patients" belongs. That last one is worth flagging in your answer: it is a spellcheck-proof error, since both spellings are real words, and it is the standard argument for why proofreading cannot be delegated to software. The same is true of the homophone errors, which is presumably why they were planted alongside the misspelling that a spellchecker would catch.

One thing the second passage does that is not strictly an error but is worth a comment if you want to show range: it mixes numeral and word forms inconsistently, with "3mm", "eighty percent", "13mm" and "thirteen milimeters" all in the same paragraph. Style guides differ on where the boundary sits, but they agree that a document should be consistent. Since the passage is clinical writing with measurements in it, and your programme almost certainly expects APA, saying briefly which convention you applied and why turns a mechanical exercise into evidence that you know style is a system rather than a set of isolated rules. Keep the comment to a sentence, since it is an observation rather than one of the four parts you were asked for. It is the sort of observation that reads as attentiveness in a writing module and as padding anywhere else, so keep it brief and keep it factual.

The guided writing exercise has a submission requirement that is easy to fail: submit both written pieces. The five-minute timed piece is meant to look unpolished — that is the point of the comparison — and the instinct to tidy it before handing it in destroys the evidence the exercise depends on. Set an actual timer, stop at five minutes, and keep the raw text exactly as it came out. Then write the corrected version separately rather than editing the original in place, so both survive. The four concluding questions ask how the experiences differed, what you did differently, whether the timing differed and how you checked your mechanics, and each wants its own answer. The question about how you checked your mechanics wants a method: reading aloud, a second pass for one error type at a time, or a checklist built from parts three and four.

Two assembly notes. All four parts go into one paper with the parts clearly marked so the professor knows which question you are addressing, which means headings rather than a continuous document — number them to match the assignment. And for part three, notice that it asks for two things per pair: define each word, and then use *those that are appropriate to a scholarly essay* in a sentence. That qualifier matters, because contractions like it's, they're and you're are generally avoided in formal academic prose, so the honest answer defines all of them and writes sentences only for the ones that belong there — and says why the others were left out. Their, there, affect, effect, its, your, then, than, accept and except all belong in scholarly prose; the three contractions are the ones to define and set aside.