In my experience with first year college writing, doing more data gathering assignments has helped with the prewriting and brainstorming. I'm getting my ideas and facts all together at once to make the writing process easier on myself the writer. That way you don’t as hard to put the paper together in the end. Without doing any brainstorming or pre-writing for my english class, I wouldn’t know where to start in writing my paper. In my english class, I was given a few different ways to gather research or support my claim on why pre-writing/ brainstorming is the most important thing to do when it comes to writing. The first data gathering assignment was to observe an interview between a student and a writing consultant, and then do an interview with the writing consultant that you observed. Doing a survey, emailing a professor from my college or from another college. This helped me build the paper in the beginning.
In college they should teach more students how to brainstorm and pre-write for a paper. In schools today they don’t really go through all of the steps thoroughly and explain how to do each thing correctly.In this reading Fish is trying to explain how college professors have to take time out to help students make up for time lost with writing skills in high school. But what should be done to help students understand the first steps of the writing process. Students shouldn't be taught the things that previous teachers had spent months on.
Once we had the start of the paper everything was easier with the research, we didn’t have to spend time doing unnecessary things like going over sentences. In Fish’s article is states that he spent a week or so going over simple things like generating sentences and replacing the words with different ones and then review one's work. In my opinion going over little things like that wastes time and doesn’t really give the student what they need in a writing class. Yes it’s good to look over your work and see what you can fix later on but I feel in classrooms today go over things that aren’t needed as much as some others. While we do need to know some of that stuff, we shouldn’t spend as much time on it as we do. I think we need to put more real world scenarios like writing emails, typing up resumes, and more of the basic college essays. That saying, they should teach us more real life things that we can take with us after college. Making the classes interesting and more important with real life.Overall the most important data gathering assignment that I did was the tutorial observation because that’s when I seen why pre-writing/ brainstorming is the most important thing. Another reason why I don’t think having mini lessons on writing sentences and changing the words isn’t important. During the interview the student had trouble knowing about any of the background and didn’t have any ideas on her subject, she was more worried about how it was written rather than knowing the information. This had led me towards my topic. You can’t start a paper without pre-writing/brainstorming.