Back to the Future: What Colleges Should Teach Today

Doctor Fish is experienced professor at Florida International University in Miami, Florida. After having distinctive experiences on numerous of different school such as University of Illinois, Chicago, also at Duke University, North Carolina. He makes a blog, at the New York Times What Should Colleges Teach? Part 3 answering questions about the educational system. Especially about what the most significant aspect of writing is.

Each person has its own idea to what
is college level writing 

Making his statements over the important aspects of the education, he comes to claim the core of writing an English paper lies, on analyzing sentences, breaking them down to its simplest form, seeing how well you write a sentence, and how it works together to convey desired meaning as one of his students states after doing many years of experimentation. Without any concrete research and only anecdotal reports Doctor Fish contends “I can only cite local successes in my classes and the anecdotal reports of former students who have employed it in their own classes”. It might be anecdotal reports, but and it might even be bias as he is reporting only students he had in the past, it still valid as one of his students, Lynn Sams, after many years of experimentations, she has concluded “the ability to analyze sentence, to understand how the parts work together to convey desired meaning, emphasis, and effect is . . . central to the writing process.” From her you can clearly agree to Doctor Fish’s statement.

With research and observations I have done at The Ohio State University at Newark’s Writer’s Studio, 

I have come to find that analyzing sentence is a big part of the writing process. As students have to read and do research to find credited information to base their paper on, and understand what they are writing, and make it also understandable to the reader. But that’s not all I have observed, the bigger portion of my research which was mentioned on my essay was emphasized on thesis. I agree with what Doctor Fish had to say, but across the years teachers have evolved and have been stressing and complicating more the idea of thesis.

Maybe they took in considerations to what Patrick Sullivan had to say about professors that grade placement exams for upcoming new freshmen’s on his article called "Whats College-Level Writing". They mention how students getting out of high school don’t have the required English skills needed to pass the minimum requirements on the English placement exam, making the grading professors disappointed, having to lower the standards. That leads to different professors not knowing exactly where the bar on “what college-level writing” really sits.

There is really no argument to make for what is exactly
college-level writing

I can safely say that asking exactly what is the most important aspect of writing a college-level English paper is like saying “flying planes is dangerous”. There is many different ways one can go about about it, and many different possible meaning, asking a professor that grades paper for a living it’s very ambiguous to the subject. Doctor Fish MIGHT had been right back in 2003, but as professors have got new expectations towards students, they have gotten new ideas to what is college-level writing. Now teachers are focusing more on the thesis and other structures of the paper, writing well written sentences and structuring them is now something that should come with you from high school well taught and well developed, as some teachers come to , there are been required to teach more material with shorter time.

As I refine my skills with the knowledge I gathered with this course I can come to understand the core reason to why English is so ambiguous. As many different people have different thought about life in general, including writing. They create different opinion to where the “college-level” sits, with them having different implications to the problem generates a cloud of equivocations to the educational theory of the concept. Leading to many problems to come. Amen!