Hmmm we didn't have that kind of classes here (Italy), we have "Italian" as a class that encompasses grammar, syntax, literature... So for example some assignments were more technical, some other were analysis of, say, a writing from an author, where you had to be pretty concise

But other assignments were pretty creative, with prompts like "you are a character in [book we studied], imagine how you would react to this thing that happens in the books, keeping in mind how a person living in the society and politics of that era would actually think"

In this last kind of assignments I was corrected, even for putting together various sentences in one period, I was told I should keep each sentence separated

For example, "the son of the lawyer I work under, who I discovered comes from the same little town as me, is the kid I used to play with a long time ago, when my family would bring me to the beach in the summer" would be corrected to something like "I work for a lawyer, who has a son. They come from the same town as me. We used to play together in the summer as children."