Responding in kind; Analyze

Stanley Fisher is a literary theorist and professor at the Cardozo law school. His argument he poses in his article, what should Colleges teach? Part 3, is that students should learn how to write academically very early, earlier than college or high school. He also states that the key to any good writer is a good reader. He argues that the amount of teaching previous teachers bear down upon college professors is too much. And those college professors shouldn’t be responsible for teaching students how to write.

Teachers need not be overstressed!

During my time in English 1109 this semester with Mr. Boezkowski, I spent 8 weeks in an observational setting at the OSU NewarkWriters Studio. In these observations I was able to better understand the things college writers focus on when writing. I noted that the ability to analyze properly while using clear academic voice is the most important tool in writing at the college level. I used this research as evidence as support in my claims.

Prose, or academic voice, is very important to a college writer’s arsenal of tools for success. A writer can ruin an entire academic paper by simply using too casual of a voice for the setting in which he or she is writing. The voice the reader hears while reading can also help to engage them further into the written piece. It can also do the exact opposite and bore them to the point where they will not even listen, or recognize the key parts of the piece. You must find the healthy medium between using interesting details and academic knowledge at the same time in your writing.

Finding the delicate balance of academic and engaging writing

I agree with Dr. Fisher in his regards to the importance of academic voice in writing; however he states that, how to write a sentence is ALL you need. There is a fundamental flaw in this though; college writing is much more than just knowing how to write coherent and intelligent sentences. Success is achieved by yes, an attention to academic voice but also, maybe even more importantly, have an ability to analyze a source clearly and effectively in relation to your argument. College students must be able to master the art of thinking, before they can write a halfway decent academic paper, if all teachers focus on is sentence structure, the students writing will never mature into academic writers. The Ability to analyze means to “Process as a method of studying the nature of something or of determining its essential features and their relations” Students need to understand how to determine relationships and essential features the artist uses to try and get his point across in any given work.

Stanley Fish bring up some interesting points about early education and sentence structure but in my opinion I think there is a little more to college writing than that. Students need to come to college with a clear knowledge of how to not only write a proper sentence but also the ability to reinforce that sentence with accurate evidence and academic knowledge from the text.