Nothing Fishy About Citation

In Stanley Fish's New York Times article What Should Colleges Teach? Part 3, he argues that the most important thing to learn about college writing is the structure of sentences. He says that "basically, there is only one thing to be learned, that a sentence is a structure of logical

Searching for answers.

relationships; everything else follows." He also believes that high school and middle school teachers are to blame when it comes to a college student's lack of writing skills. I do not believe that this is all on the teachers, but I do agree that sentence structure is important. However, is sentence structure the only important thing to teach?


I wanted to find out from others what they thought was important to college writing. I started at the Writers Studio at my school, The Ohio State University at Newark. I had the opportunity to observe a tutoring session with another student there and then interviewed that tutor. The topic of citing kept coming up. I then surveyed a dozen college students and interviewed a former teacher at the University of Illinois at Chicago and got their opinions on citing in college. Most of the college students answered saying that avoiding plagiarism was a major reason for citation. Tom Moss, the teacher from UIC, agreed with me by saying that citation is a great way to show the credibility of your work.


I think citing is a topic that is not talked about enough in schools, and some students don't even know why we cite. The importance of citation needs to be taught. So we can evade plagiarism, make our writing more credible, and so on. When I was in grade school I remember

But seriously... just cite.

spending weeks learning about the structure of sentences and paragraphs, but I only spent about fifteen minutes talking about citing. And now that I'm in college I realize that, yes sentence structure is important and can help you get a better grade BUT without citing you have a good chance of failing that paper, or even worse, getting expelled.


To sum up my thoughts on Fish, yes I agree that teaching the structure of sentences is important, but so is learning why we cite and how to do it. In my opinion, I think that Fish was just a little bit obsessed with sentences and I wonder why he didn't want other things to be taught. But think about this, when you cite in-text, the citation is literally a part of the sentence!