Fishing Fish

For my current English class in the Ohio State University I was required to read the article "What Shoul Colleges Teach?" by Stanley Fish. In the article he talked about how there is debate over whether writing classes should allow students to write their papers in their own English dialect or if they should be required to do them in proper English. Mr. Fish argued how proper English is more respected and more universal among the professional world. After reading this I do find I agree with this thought there are a lot of places where proper English is extremely important to your career and not a lot where less formal dialects are important.

I feel that college is meant to educate people and prepare them for the professional world. For colleges to do that it means that a lot of colleges will require you to take general education classes such as history, mathematics, and for this topic English. English classes I feel needs to teach you a professional dialect that is respected in the professional world and a dialect that is more universally understood by English speakers and writers. Unfortunately for a lot of people that means they have to learn proper English and for a lot of people that is not their native English dialect. This can be for many reasons such as they have just learned English and don’t know all the proper rules or the high school they went to was not very effective at teaching it.

In the professional world it is very important to appear as educated as possible and sadly a lot of dialects for English are not viewed this way. A lot of the different dialects for the English language can often come across as lazy and unprofessional and, this could cost one a potential job or to not be well respected among your peers. For example if you were to submit an article to an academic database that was riddled with slang terms and phrases that aren’t proper English it can appear that you were too lazy to learn proper English and thus hurt your credibility as someone who dose research for those databases both among the people who review and put it up and the students who would read it looking for information to use on whatever assignment they had. This is just one example of how proper English can make one look professional and how informal English can make one look unprofessional.

Slang offten makes you look
like this to potenal emplyers

Dielects very from place to place meaning that some words have different meanings. If you are the kind that travels to English speaking areas or communicates with English speakers and writers all over the world it is also very important you learn proper English. This is due to the fact that a lot of dialects are not very accessible to those who don’t know them. Proper English is more universal in the world people who speak and write English can understand something that is written and spoken in proper English. However if you are traveling and you ask for something in your own slang term from your home area then the person you are asking would likely give you a blank stare. Another example could be if a writer for a nationwide newspaper or a writer for really anything that will be seen by English speakers and readers around the world was to use their local English dialect then likely a large number of the readers will be confused over what the writer was trying to say or could even completely misinterpret the message the article was trying to deliver. 

You don't want your reader to look like this. Do you?

I really hope that this argument helped you see my point of view even if you don’t agree with it. I can understand why people would feel that colleges need to pick up the slack from others but I feel that it happens enough that it is unavoidable. I really do see the value of learning proper English in college to help prepare for the professional world. For without proper English a lot of professionals can come across as unprofessional or unintelligible. I want to thank you for taking the time to read this and I hope you were able to take something from this