In Stanley Fisher’s blog “What should Colleges Teach?” (part 3), https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/what-should-colleges-teach/ he talks about high schools not teaching writing skills in effective ways and that the only exceptions seem to be Catholic schools. He also talks about breaking down the sentence into its most natural form and working from there. In the blog, he says “You have to start with a simple but deep understanding of the game, which for my purposes is the game of writing sentences.” Whereas most colleges do not teach simple sentence structure and grammar because they expect you to know it all ready. He then goes on to explain how he would teach his classes and gives a few examples of the exercises he would do with his students.

In my personal life involving English classes, most of the classes have always focused on structure, the root meaning of the sentence, and why we write the way we do. When I got to college, my sentence structure was very good compared to some people who went to a high school where they did not focus on sentence structure. They made it a major point in all four of my high school years that colleges expect me to know this, therefore, they drilled it into my head. I remember sitting in class, not paying attention while learning about verbs and adjectives. Learning to analyze a sentence is more beneficial than learning grammar.

You must know where to start your sentence http://psycnet.apa.org/record/1975-00868-000, it’s a major key to writing. If you do not know how you are going to start your writing/introduction for a sentence or a paragraph then, honestly you are setting your writing up to fail. It is extremely important to know how to analyze your sentence because when you analyze a sentence it helps you understand the function of its nouns and verbs. Once you analyzed the sentence you can then determine the true function of each noun and verb and then create a diagram to display their functions.

Grammar is needed to succeed in life http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02687030600911344, but learning how to analyze something is a skill you can use in your everyday life. In my opinion, knowing the basic English rules and knowing how to form sentences structures is far more important than getting into advanced English practices. Everything is about building a structure so that when you write you have a strong body and many details to back it up. Without a good base, you are more likely to struggle or even worse, fail later in life.

I would teach my classes in a very similar way as Fish would teach his class, by making the focus of the class on the structure of sentences, and the grammar behind it. In Fish’s blog, he uses exercises such as asking students to make a sentence out of a random list of words, and then explain what they did. He asked students to turn a three-word sentence like “Jane likes cake” into a 100-word sentence without losing control of the basic structure. Then they had to explain word-by-word, clause-by-clause, what they did, and asking students to replace the nonsense words in the first stanza of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” with ordinary English words. They needed to replace them in a way that makes coherent sense, and then explain what they did, and how they knew what kind of word to put into each “slot.”

  

In the end, Fish in my opinion is correct on how colleges should teach. They should start with the basics or at the minimum have a remedial course for students that need a little reminder on the basics of forming sentences and their structure. Like I stated before, it will help you tremendously if you know how to analyze your sentences and create your diagram so that you can better understand your nouns, verbs, and sentence structures. In conclusion, I feel that it is extremely important to understand the basics of writing.