Saturday, December 10, 2016

"What Fish Thinks vs What I Think"

Stanley Fish, who is an expert in his field of being a well-known English professor who taught at Florida International University in Miami, Florida. He is credited for writing an article called "What Should Colleges Teach, Part 3?" Fish explains in his article that students at the high school level don't have experience doing college level writing in their previous assignments. In Fish's opinion, he states his claim about crafting good sentence structures being the most important to college level writing. According to Fish, he explains that he would focus mainly on teaching students about crafting good sentences. “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.” 

I agree with what Fish says that constructing sentences is a great way to understand college level writing. Being able to create good grammatical and creative sentences is a great way to help you with college level writing. Another fact is that you had to come with good sentence structures to be able to get into college in the first place. Fish says "By all the evidence, high schools and middle schools are not teaching writing skills in an effective way, if they are teaching them at all." Therefore, Fish's focus is to teach students mainly about sentences.

My statement is that I believe constructing good research is the most important aspect to college level writing. I don't disagree with Fish about constructing good sentences, but I do believe constructing good research is more of an important topic to teach college students. Most people don't have trouble making sentences as much as trying to construct good research on their topic, and think that being able to construct good meaningful research is more important. I can imagine teaching the topic of constructing good sentences to students, sounding like cricket noises compared to teaching the topic of constructing good meaningful research to students.

Even Obi Wan Kenobi knows what key terms to look for

 For myself being a college student in an English class, I've had to do Data Gathering Assignments and found that conducting good research is the most important to college level writing. In my research of doing Data Gathering Assignments, I conducted a survey, watched an tutorial observation, interviewed a tutor of The Ohio State University Newark Campus Writer's Studio, and interviewed professor Paul McCormick of The Ohio State Newark Campus University English Department.   

The first most important part to constructing good research is choosing appropriate key terms. Reasons to choosing appropriate key terms is because they can help you pull out what's the most important parts to your research. When starting a paper, you usually start with a central question going into your paper. The key terms are usually two terms that you pull out of your question and research them. What this also does is consumes less of your time, by using what's most important to your paper. 

Primary Sources and Secondary Sources make research easier

 The second most important aspect to constructing good research is looking for good primary and secondary sources. Primary sources help discover the main facts to your paper that will give great evidence to your knowledge of your subject. Secondary sources are facts that help back up your primary sources.

For the last important step to constructing good research is reading through any abstracts of articles that you discover. How this can help you is in the way of not consuming so much time reading through an whole article. Abstracts are in other words summaries of the article as a whole and pull out the most important key parts of information. You can compare abstracts to be like your key terms when looking for good research/facts. Although you should be like a detective when doing research and take your time, you don't want to be wasting your time as well. Key terms, primary and secondary sources, and abstracts are all aspects that help not waste your time doing research. 
Leonardo Dicaprio salutes you for looking through abstracts 

Therefore in order to be successful, college writers conduct research well, which includes choosing appropriate key terms for research, including a mix of primary and secondary sources when possible, and reading any discovered articles' abstracts. These are all the steps you have to take for constructing good research to be a successful college level writer. 

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