Fishing for all the Focus

Stanley Fish

Everyone says Fish is one of the biggest people on college writing. Fish mostly talks about sentence structure, meaning and understanding and purpose. Fish says that in elementary schools and middle schools they are not teaching writing skills in an effective way. Who is Fish? Fish is a professor of humanities and law at Florida International University. In 2012 he became Floersheimer Distinguished. Fish is the author of 15 books. A lot of teachers and students know more and more about Fish and follow and agree on what he says about college writing to either help them or other students become better writers.

A pencil for writing so much
in the Writers' studio

Doing college writing this whole semester has taught me so much and showed me what I need to focus on in my writing. My college writing paper was about focusing. It’s ironic that I ended up picking focusing because focusing is something I have always had a little bit of trouble when it comes to writing. After weeks passed and going to the writers studio I came up with three main points of focusing that can also help out other students that have trouble with focusing.

The three focus points I talked about in my paper were focusing on the brainstorming before the paper to narrow down to what’s most important that you should be focused on. I talked about focusing on a result of writing meaning focus on your main argument in the paper. The last focus point I wrote about was focusing on your progress step meaning narrow down what your paper is supposed to be about and focusing on how to narrow it down to that spot.

When focusing on all three main points when putting it into a paper make sure your whole paper follows your thesis. Sometimes writers have an awesome thesis, but none on the rest of the paper follows what it should be about. Learning about focusing on main points tutors and anyone else that has worked with me came up with a theory that sometimes it is better to leave your thesis to do at the end of finishing your paper so when you put your thesis in it matches the whole paper.

An inverted  pyramid to help guide you while
writing your paper! 

College writing is very important. Most students do not realize how important it is until they have to write a college paper and do research on it. I have learned so much from all the research I have done and all the time I have learned on what college writing really is. I feel like I have become such a better writer over the past weeks by going through will my whole paper and soaking in much information as I can. After all the research and finally doing a college level writing paper I finally feel like I can do it. I say focusing is a huge thing in college writing because in order for me to get through my papers I have had to put a lot of focusing into it. Fish says sentence structure is a big college writing thing which I honestly never paid much attention to. Fish says meaning and understanding is very important and last but not least purpose. I have to agree on purpose 100% because I truly do believe every college writing paper needs to have a purpose for people to want to read it. I am glad I got introduced to everything Fish had to say about college writing because after I thought I could not learn anymore I did.