There is no good or bad discipline; there is only discipline and indiscipline. Indiscipline is when you know what to do and you deliberately refuse to do it. Many of our students know how to write but they deliberately refuse to adhere to the rules of grammar. That is the indiscipline that leads us to poor grades.

 Discipline in writing saves us a lot of trouble. It starts with your handwriting, spelling, and sentence construction to other grammatical demands. In one of my tutorials, I called upon someone to write a sentence on the blackboard. He wrote, “I went 2 town yesterday.” I refuse to see this as trendy; this is indiscipline and it is the major source of retakes at university.
 Having a good background in the English language is not a guarantee that you will write standard papers. Yes, I have encountered students who speak English almost like natives but cannot write a sentence. Writing is a medium of communication that deals with symbols. When some symbols are ignored or misused, it results in the misunderstanding of the ideas expressed in your writing.  For instance, in a sentence like, “Am I looking at my dinner or the dogs?” your omission of the apostrophe in “dog’s” creates ambiguity.
Your lecturer will not tolerate ambiguity especially if he has about 200 scripts to mark. Recently, a colleague came to me with a badly written student’s paper and asked me to try and make out what the student was trying to say.  The ideas were carelessly expressed in vernacular using English words! One sentence read, “Protection of the jobs for the teachers are neglected especially by teacher’s unions are present but dormant.” If that lecturer had a deadline to beat, would he spend his time puzzling over a single paper for hours?
Some of us went to schools where the aspect of handwriting was not handled properly. Sometimes I look at a student’s script and ask myself whether it is Arabic or English. Someone will even write in symbols that are not part of the English alphabet in an academic essay! Discipline your hand. Write as though you were writing for a child or an elderly parent. Take it upon yourself to impress your lecturer by writing clearly and neatly.  A good handwriting to an overworked lecturer is very refreshing.  But if you think it is impossible to improve your handwriting, then type your assignments. This is the computer age after all. 
The Bible clearly teaches that you reap what you sow.   How do you expect to reap an ‘A’ when you sowed a ‘C-‘? No lecturer will give you an ‘A’ for an essay that has careless errors.  The discipline in writing comes from within us and the motivation to score good marks. But let us remember that we are about to be professionals and we will be in charge of others. What kind of boss do you want to make? One who writes a memo starting with “2 DE STAFF”?

The writer is a lecturer in the department of Languages and Literature