Abstract
There are no longitudinal studies available that measure a student's growth of sophistication and grammatical complexity. Using cognitive process theory, I examined long term and short term memory and situated the use of my instruments in gauging a writer's cognitive maturation. This study set out to measure grammatical complexity year over year with at-unit analysis and measure writer sophistication with a constant comparative analysis using Beaufort's (2007) developmental framework. Data consisted of eight years of essays from 12th grade up to 7th year of college (or 2°d year of graduate school). All essays came from English classes, except essays after 3rd year of college came from Literature courses. While sophistication of knowledge increased throughout college, grammatical complexity increased from college year 1 to college year 3 but then plateaued for the remaining years. This suggests that there is a minimum grammatical threshold a student needs prior to engaging with the growing complexities of a discourse community.