In reference to Fish’s argument “What should colleges teach?” I think what should be taught to students, should be exercises on how to take your own opinions or thoughts into functioning paragraphs, but it has to be in a way that let students keep their culture and identity. What I mean by culture and identity I am simply referring to the students individual background in a household sense or nationality. Furthermore with the way our culture is constantly evolving especially with slang being more and more fluent in everyday talk not to mention some of our home talk. They might have different ways of saying things, which do not flow as freely on paper in a college essay as it might have sounded in their own words.

Furthermore, when I was going to the writer’s studio at OSU Newark and taking field notes for my English 1109 class. I got to observe other current students engaging in different types of college writing being assisted by a peer writing consultant. Over the course of a few sessions patterns began to emerge that were consistent with most of the students. In fact I had to incorporate some of these observations into the big class paper.

While observing I noticed there was a problem that was common among student writers. It is hard to transfer your thoughts to fluid and rational sentences in proper writing form because no one person chooses words the same. We all use words in different contexts, in fact most daily conversations that we have with other people would make no sense on paper. Because we it would lack the emphasis that can make a word mean another thing in a different context. I can recall one observation when it was a real struggle for the student to choose how her words were going to flow for her opinion on what a topic meant to her. I remember the peer writing consultant trying to coerce to have a particular style in her writing but I do not think she saw it as her. So this struggle forced to find her specific They Say, I Say” to build upon to have the edge need for college level writing.

In my own opinion, college instructors should teach some kind of writing exercises that challenges students to think at a more abstract level. So that they can handle the different ideas and concepts that they are being exposed to a whole lot better. I figure such exercises would help put seeds in their thought processes to be able to show they can understand and rationalize complex ideas. Furthermore these writing exercises should also have to incorporate the same structure that traditional college writing requires in terms of grammatical value and paragraph structure. One way I see this being achieved is through paraphrasing.

I recently wrote a whole essay on this very fact because through my observations I had to witness patterns among students. I think these exercises should consist of fill in the blank paragraphs. Which require the students to have to focus on connecting the same ideas as the original texts but with different wording in them. These exercises are to make them somewhat challenging will also have to keep the same punctuation. Although the text is missing a great amount of sentences it still has enough information that the main clause is still there. Then it could be the student’s job to add in complete sentences consisting of their own thoughts. By doing this I think they could get the idea on how to get across their own ideas without straying off of topic. The reason I think this would work is because it forces a student to be careful on the topic of each sentence and the choice of words. I believe that this very action will also inherit ably force the students to be more familiar with a thesaurus thus expanding there vocabulary.