Think before you fish.

Why is thinking like fishing?

 In Stanley Fish's controversy article "What should colleges teach? Part 3", the topic of how college level students should be taught sentence structure in college is something he focuses highly on,but who has time for that? I on the other hand agree with his article, but find that more practical ways of teaching students could be taught in different ways.

Going to high school I was never taught the importance of sentence structure.On the contrary, my mother was taught sentence structure and found it useful.Having to learned better sentence structure would make writing much easier for students such as myself .For I tend to make run on sentences and not focus on the main parts. To fix this is easier said then done. I felt once I came to college that I was ill-prepared and didn't understand how to put sentences together. I do think however that we as students going into college should be taught how to organize our papers and work on putting two and two together:synthesizing.

Learning to synthesize is very difficult to some including myself. I find that synthesizing actually has me putting two topics together and digging deeper into my studies then I ever had to. That's one thing that I wasn't taught in high school that I have learned in my first semester in college. In a way I feel that Stanley Fish is right when he quotes at the end of his article "Amen" to a quote brought beautifully together by Lynn Sams when she states that "the ability to analyze sentences, to understand how the parts work together to convey desired meaning,emphasis, and effect is...central to the writing process."  (“How to Teach Grammar, Analytical Thinking and Writing; A Method that Works,” English Journal, January, 2003).

In one of the papers I wrote in college I described  how it is important for one to find meaningful patterns in the things they will research..I came up with this idea from article written by L. Lennie Irvin.I emphasized that there is no importance to pick up an article or bring one up on the internet to read and not find something intriguing about it. Therefore, I would like to know if you ever think about how you organize your papers, do you ever structure your thoughts, or do you concentrate on sentence structures when looking at articles.

 Fish brings out a valid point by saying "putting a simple sentence on the table" he then tells us that he works on this simple sentence for a week.We as students can do the same in our work by reading  these sentences, understanding them and making them extraordinary by polishing and evolving them. Therefore the art of sentence structure isn't pointless but rather a more organized piece of time teaching us to better understand the specificity of sentence structure.

I do however argue on the other hand that a semester of college should not be spent talking all about sentence structure. I feel that in the first semester of college professors should focus on how students think critically and solve problems. How are students able to bring new ideas to the table and how they can better improve those ideas.Sentence structure of course plays a key role in how creative we can be in our papers and still teaching how to organize our papers too.

How fishing is similar to critical thinking and sentence structure.

When I think of sentence structure I think of thinking how to fish. For expert fishers they don't have to think about all the steps they have got to take to cast that perfect line, they already know from previous knowledge, so they cast they're line. For us beginners we have to think, where do I want to cast, how far out do I cast, what bait do i use, and how long do i wait. With no experience we''ll ask ourselves these questions. With experience we will be able to answer these questions quicker and with more creative responses. Much the same as sentence structure and asking ourselves questions in our own writings.