To the Reef and Behind

Be the Pig not Chicken 

We as people think with both are mines and bodies to make are everyday choices. So when I read, Stanley Fish “What should college Teach?” I was surprised to see him say that college should reteach college student how to write sentences and forget an important thing that should go before that or along side it:

You have to start with a simple but deep understanding of the game, which for my purposes is the game of writing sentences.

 I feel that colleges should teach students how to be critical thinkers when it comes to writing. Being a critical thinker allows you to better put forward the best of your work. I say critical thinking because in high school and other institute before college they taught us the 5 paragraph method as a form of writing but that only limited your mind.

Brainstorming Enough to fill the Ocean

when we think critically it allows us to freely express ourselves in ways that we didn’t know we could. When i say critical thinking it comes in different forms and in different points in the writing you may be doing. Like at the beginning of a paper you are told in the five paragraph method to have a topic, To only support it with 3 things that restricting your thinking. But in my way of critical thinking you must brainstorming first not just 3 support topic but all of them. Come up with all forms of arguments good or bad that relate to your topic. The thought of this came to me when studying work from The university of Texas A&M writing Studio on critical thinking, which defines as follows:

Critical thinking is, simply put, careful, skeptical, and conscious thinking; it is the sort of thinking, guided by logic and method, that academics value.

I say this because you have to be ready for anything mean to defend or backup your topic so then nothing is left out but that doesn’t mean lost focus of your topic but on strengthening it.

Fight the Good fight 

After having all this information writing doing you must then organize it to meet the standards of the paper. With this it leads to my next tool to be a better critical thinker, organization. The good and bad things about your topic can be all used if you find a way to balance it all to fight on your side. When looking at the information look for similarities that the good and bad have, so for example you may start of with the bad but flip it to a support the good argument. If you don't believe me take it from Megan Boeshart (A college student with a masters in English and working on her PhD in English) How she felt about organization she responded with this:

organization requires you yo carefully consider how to present information to an audience in the most effective way

When doing this it blocks the nah Sayers in their tracks because you beat them to the punch of their argument leaving them nothing to say.


Hold on a second you thought your done while guess what your not . After finishing put the final touches to your paper you must now revise it. When doing this you must reread your work not just for miss spelling but to make sure that your message/topic is present. What I mean by present is it is easily picked up on but hard to be argued against. I seen this played out in front of me when i sit in on a session at the writing studio at Newark (OSU), Zach (Peer Writing Consultant) lead deja (student) to when he made her go back over everything they talk about in there session at the end to make sure that she understood everything they talk about and learned. As I stated before i was only surprised what Stanley fish had to say about what should be taught again to college students. But I feel that we must first retrain are minds to become better students. We must learn to be are selves and to move pass are primitive way of think to allow as to be better writers. Then as fish said learn to better write sentences because HOW CAN WE WRITE SENTENCES IF WE DON’T HAVE CONTENT TO WRITE IT ON.

Can you tell me? Can You?