Ring Around the Rosy: My Idea of College Level Writing

After reading “What Should Colleges Teach? Part 3" http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/what-should-colleges-teach-part-3/ a blog post by Stanley Fish I would have to agree with his connection that many college freshmen have not been taught writing skills in an effective way. He then follows with his on insight that “I cannot see, however, why the failure of secondary education relieves college teachers of a responsibility to make up the deficit.”  He writes that sometimes even in college, students may be better taught to follow simple steps such as learning how to build a sentence and then progress from that point.  

Mr. Fish through his quest to overcome deficiency in college writing devised a writing method that involved students writing a list of words and then explain what the word did. Through this simple process he was able to teach the basic beginnings of sentence building. These sentence exercises progressed and would eventually become the foundation of college writing.

As a student returning to college, after being out of high school for twenty-plus years, most definitely agrees with this simple process of writing. I believe with the wide diversity of students now enrolling in America’s colleges that it is not only necessary, but imperative for all teachers to keep in mind, that what may seem familiar to them is not always going to be true for the student attending their class.

I have noticed at The Ohio State University that many of our campus students are either what the University calls “non-traditional” students (older) or students not originally from our country.   Mr. Fish also doesn’t feel that one has the hope of learning to write through the process of reading many texts, which again leads me to believe that the art of learning good writing should be a series of steps.

Recently, I was granted permission to observe student and peer writing consultant tutorials in the writing lab http://newark.osu.edu/academics/degreesatnewark/english/thewritersstudio/Pages/index.aspx at our campus in Newark, Ohio.  It was through these observations that I was able to witness another set of steps that college writing follows. Students were given an essay assignment from which they had to build their paper from. It was through these steps of building their paper that I found the connection to Fish’s idea of starting out small and then progressing further to complete this imaginary ring around writing.  

Ring Around the Rosy

The students first had to pick a topic, read text and then begin collecting and building on their ideas. I see similarity between these steps and what Stanley Fish writes when answering the question, what is a sentence? “My answer has two parts: (1) A sentence is an organization of items in the world. (2) A sentence is a structure of logical relationships.”

Once the students had picked their topic and read the text that accompanies it, they then needed to start organizing there paper into a logical format that allowed for easy reading. To be successful in this process the student needed to ensure that what they wrote had a clear thesis statement, and gave the reader direction as to what their view was on the topic they were writing about.

When, student Jacob Brubaker was asked “How important is a thesis statement?” He responded back, “This is important because it sets the whole mind set of the paper that the reader is about to read.” Also when forming a sentence there has to be a subject and predicate structure to give direction as to what is being conveyed.

As to the question of whether Fish’s method of teaching sentence building improves writing skills in college students, I would have to counter with questioning, does it hurt? I, a so called “non-traditional” students can see the many benefits of his method. From my own experience of being out of the educational loop for so many years have great anxiety about college and college level writing. As written in the Association for Psychological Science by Mary J. Allen, California State University-Bakersfield, "As you design the course, consider each element from the perspective of your students."  http://www.psychologicalscience.org/teaching/tips/tips_0900.html I would prefer that the teachers put the shoe on the other foot and maybe acknowledge that not every student’s educational backgrounds are equal. It makes more since to me that every student is given a foundation in their college experience that would be more of an even playing field and what better way to accomplish this than starting out simple.