Focusing on the Big Picture; Outlining!!!

What if you walked into your first college class and your professor looked to all of you and said that this class is totally based on how to make good sentences? First off, that’s boring and second off, taking a class like that would probably make me want to drop out. Creating a sentence is different for everyone. Based on your background or where you grew up and the type of language you have been exposed to all your life directly affects the way you talk and how you create sentences.  Stanley Fish addressed in his article “What Should Colleges Teach?” that the most important thing that professors should be teaching their students is how to correctly format and create sentences. This can be hard to reteach not just one student, but a whole universities way of communication. Not to mention a university is created entirely of students from different places throughout the world, so that is a lot of variance in ethnicities and cultures and a lot different types of communication.  

https://gfycat.com/hoarseflateyra 
Please do not write like Shakespeare, he obviously
has a a lot going on with himself and his writing. 

       I agree that there is some importance that Fish states in why students need to learn how to create good sentences. But, I also believe that stressing the importance of creating a sentence can actually worsen someone's writing. I think that students who focus on writing sentences too much will make their sentences too complex so then what they have wrote, then becomes unclear to the reader. Fish says that, “It is because our students come to us unable to write clean English sentences that we are obligated to supply what they did not receive from their previous teachers.” This statement does make sense, not everyone has had the same provided education therefore some of their writing skills may be lacking. Although many students still make good pieces of writing through being themselves and talking through their own type of language. Personally, reading a piece that has some personality to it, is ten times more entertaining than someone who writes like William Shakespear.  

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-fm
cc-standupspeakout-2/chapter/why-outline/
Format of how to outline

      Instead of professors giving their attention mainly to creating sentences, they should focus on the bigger picture of a piece of writing. Outlining is an a very important aspect of college writing. Whether you outline or not, that is your choice, but it will affect the overall piece of writing that you turn in. Outlining gives the writer the opportunity to organize their thoughts and ideas. Based on the prompt that a teacher gives you, and the length of the paper, you need to format in some way and get yourself organized before beginning the paper. Outlining also helps your collected data to be placed in the right places throughout an essay in the best way so that it makes sense to the reader. It also makes sure that your data supports the specific claims that you are making. While doing this, you're saving a significant amount of time spent while writing the paper and you can spend more time revising the paper when it is completed.  

      There were many steps I took in order to further my knowledge over the importance of outlining in college. I sat in on a tutoring session at the OSU Writers Studio and had a follow up interview with the tutor. I created a survey based on the importance of outlining primarily which college students took this survey. I continued to look up extra sources and documents that helped support as to why outlining is so beneficial to college students and their writing. 

https://giphy.com/explore/bad-dream
You waking up in the middle night after having
a bad dream about failing a paper
because you didn't
outline before your paper. 

Outlining is an important strategy that everyone should learn how to use so that it benefits not only their overall performance of their paper, but also saves the writer a lot of time. Karen Craigo who has been a teacher for many years and has graded few papers in her day, says that the advantage of outlining, “is that it gives students something to turn to when they're lost. They can just move on to the next part and come back to the troublesome section later. That's an empowering tool.” Craigo provides an additional perspective but takes it in a different direction. It can be hard to figure out what you want to write or don’t know where to start so outlining is kind of like a map to guide you through your paper. I mean, wouldn’t you like a map if you were stranded in the middle of nowhere, which usually only happens in bad dreams. But hey, writing papers is definitely like a bad dream.  

       Fish did have a good point that students should learn how to create a complex sentence because this will come in handy throughout their college carrier, but teachers should focus on the benefitting students writing overall. Outlining is an important strategy that all college writers should learn how to do so they are saving time and in the long run are benefitting their performance of the paper.