Fishing & Reading

Kids happily reading

“What Should Colleges Teach? Part 3” written by Stanley Fish is an article talking about writing in college. He posed a question asking about should writing be taught long before students get to high school or even earlier on in middle school. He states “By all the evidence, high schools and middle schools are not teaching writing skills in an effective way.” This is kind of true now because I wasn't really prepared for writing in college while in high school. They only taught us basic things that don’t really have to do with college. He also asked another question regarding if reading should be the key to learning how to write?  

I really liked the part where Fish said writing should start out in middle and high school. That’s so true because I feel like in high school they are not preparing us for College writing at all. It’s hard when you come to college thinking that you are ready and all when you are not. High school teachers are leaving all the work to College professors. All 4 years of high school should be preparing us for college writing, so when we do get to college we have an idea of what we are getting into. It shouldn't be when we get to college then we start learning basic things that should’ve been taught in high school or middle school. It actually slows us down and now we haven’t really learned anything useful that we could bring with us to college.

I also agree with Fish when he said that students need to learn how to read from a young age. Reading and writing go hand in hand and that’s where I have a problem. I don’t really read books all like that and I only read when I have to. I think that’s where I struggle with writing, if I was to read more I think I would love writing more and have more to talk about. I did an eight-week observation on a one-on-one tutor and student session and it has opened my eyes a lot on college writing. I noticed that every time my student Jenna would come in she would have all these sources she was reading from and it helped her expand her paper a lot. Fish said that the relationship of reading and writing is very important, and I actually seen the difference if you do read you get better at writing or at least you know what to write about.

Lisa from the Simpsons

Those are important for college writing but I think the main thing is a thesis statement. Thesis statement is the make or break of your paper. If your thesis is not strong your paper is not strong either. The thesis is what’s supposed to catch the reader’s eye and state what you are going to be talking about throughout your paper. A lot of students have a problem with the thesis because I think it’s the hardest part of the paper. Jenna had a hard time with her thesis, and the PWC helped her work on it and told her think of it as “A change B because of C” and that’s how she looked at the layout of the thesis.

Overall I have to agree with what Fish says in his essay but he needs to add thesis to his claims. It’s the most important thing that you need for a paper besides sentence structure and learning how to write since middle or high school. He figured out the little things that college writing needs but he didn't talk about the most important one of them all.