Following the Gills of Fish: Structure in College Writing

After I read Stanley Fish’s Article I could say that I do agree with what he says. He makes many good points of how college English classes should be taught and the curriculum that should be within them. Right off the bat Dr. Fish says that high school and middle schools are not teaching to the best of their ability and informing the students of the correct information. This makes it difficult for students to be at college professor’s expectations.

Dr. Fish states in his article that he believes that because students cannot write proper English sentences this is why their college writings are not up to standard. This could be taken into many views. College writing has a lot of components and singling out sentences seems very harsh. This statement is true but there is more to college writing than that. Students do not believe they can do the college professors expectations because they were not taught properly. Finding out what is most important to college writing could take many years and a lot of different opinions.


Stanley Fish helped me realize what college writing was about along with the sessions and classes I've had throughout this first year English class. Reading this article put college writing into a different perspective by saying sentences are extremely important. If you tried reading a book or even paragraph without punctuation it is extremely difficult. Along with reading a sentence when it doesn’t have the correct requirements. Finally realizing this and hearing it from another person helps notice how important it really is.

Although I do agree with Stanley Fish in some perspectives, but I also have my own thoughts on what college writing is about. I believe that in order to have a well written paper structure needs to be applied. Without structure a paper would be extremely hard to read and follow. Saying that structure is important lets both students and professors get a larger view about college writing. Structure lets a paper have a flow and helps with the bigger picture.



Student being tutored

 For eight weeks I have been visiting the Writers studio and watching other people write their college papers. During these eight sessions there was a lot to learn and a lot to figure out about what is most important for college level writing. I found out that in order to have a well drafted and organized college paper there has to be some form of structure. Without structure the paper would be extremely hard to read and it would be easy to get lost. It would almost be like trying to follow a map with no clue where you are. These eight sessions let us students have a better grasp on college writing.

Map showing the outline and structure

When searching to find an article that related with what I believe college level writing is I found this article that I agree with completely. This article also states when and where having organization in a college paper would be important. This article says that organizing your thoughts and making an outline will help have a better final paper. This article basically sums up exactly how I feel about organization in college writing.

When Fish talks about the assignment he has students do with making a sentence out of random words I think that this is actually really creative. Having a bunch of random words a trying to put them in a sentence would be hard because we don’t know the order they should be in we can create them ourselves. This assignment would help students be creative with their words and show them how to have a structure with no real structure assigned. Having to analyze the work that they had already done is important to realize what they have done and what they could do better. Having to analyze our own work is important because we need to know what is wrong with the work we have done and it would let the students get a better idea of how sentences should be.

Stanley Fish has many good statements within his blog post. I found it extremely interesting to find out how another professor feels towards college writing. I do think it is important to have students tell what is important about college writing, because then you can get an idea of how they think about college writing. What is college level writing could be one never ending question.