Common connection between me and Fish

During the semester at Ohio State University in Newark me and my classmates were given multiple assignment that would help each other get better at writing but there were these two assignment one where I would have to learn why sources are important when writing papers and another where I would have to survey random people who are current students of a college or graduates who have graduated in a six-month time frame what is needed to become a good college writer? Some of their answers were to make sure that I do not waste time on the writing assignment and start early on it, and others said to make sure that I have sources to support what I am trying to say or in other words it would be better to have detail in what you are writing which matches with a reading that we were also assigned to do and make a response towards what we had read in a blog. 

Getting better in writing papers over time

The blog post was by man named Stanley Fish "What colleges should teach", where he states his opinion about what colleges should teach and in his column I agree with what Fish is saying where he explains to the reader that colleges should have methods of teaching students how to write better such as having them reading more in order to increase the students’ vocabulary so that they could have more word choices to choose from when writing. Also it was interesting to me how he was discussing the different steps that you could take when you have to write a paper. One thing that I noticed while reading was that he was talking about how reading books is an important method for students to help teach them how to write better, it also teaches them some formatting and grammar skills.

Teaching writing in a earlier time

I agree with what Fish is saying I feel that there is another step missing in his column which is the fact the we actually teach students how to properly write in college, when I feel like it should started at a much earlier time. The reason why I say that is because have you ever met someone that can write or type a paper with ease, or someone that can not type a paper to save their life? Well I’m one of those people that cannot type a long paper with ease. I don’t know why I have such a hard time writing paper’s I guess its because I do not put enough detail in my paper because I feel that I could answer a question or make a statement with just one to five sentences that would answer the question completely.

When you are struggling to write a paper

I still struggle with writing papers and I know that over time I will get better as I continue to take English class and getting help when needed. Lastly another thing that interested me in the article by Fish he speaks about the importance of structure in a sentence and having detail when writing a paper and explaining why its important which really is similar to what I am having trouble with because when I write I have an issue with not writing enough because I feel like I could answer a question or write about something in a very brief way and not having to have like a extended answer on a topic. Even though there are people that I know that write to much and then in the end of their paper they would have to cut some things out and get to the point. And there are people that would have to extend their meaning by including sources to help support what they are trying to say.  I believe that over time I will get better at it and that would make me a better writer overall.

Sentence Structure & Thesis statement

In Stanley Fischer's blog “What Should College Teach?”(part 3), he talks about schools not using effective methods for teaching writing. It puts a burden on college teachers to make up for those missed skills. He wonders what ways teachers can improve a student writing. According to Fish, he believes the most important skill a college student needs to know is sentence structure. I agree with him, but we need to focus on the most important sentence in a paper, a thesis statement.

Fish choice of teaching his class the way he does is really interesting. Like Fish, I would focus my class on sentence structure and thesis which is the most important sentence in a paper. A thesis is defined in The Cambridge Dictionary as “a thesis is also the main idea, opinion, or theory of a speaker or writer, who then attempts to prove it.” Furthermore, Fish course was entirely sentence-structured except for one part. He gave students part of a sentence and told them to add on while looking back to the narrative that has been already developed. In addition, he mentioned using the book called “They say/ I say” which introduces students to the forms of argument. These forms of argument lead to developing your thesis statement. 

A thesis is a necessary skill needed for writing certain papers in college. When structuring your thesis as a beginner, you should do it in a, A, B, and C fashion. A, B, and C represent the three strongest points for your argument. For each paragraph following the thesis statement will have a point that is stated previously. This helps to keep your arguments focused without “fully understanding why” while convincing your readers. Without a good thesis, you’re setting a maze for your readers. 

During the first semester, I had an opportunity to do an observation/interview at the Ohio State University Newark Writer’s Studio. I’ve observed a tutor and a student discussing a paper which gave me an idea what college writing is. In the interview with the tutor, I personally asked him what was the most important aspect of college-level writing and he said thesis. This lead me to discover thesis is a very important factor in writing. 

For my analytical research essay, my topic was a thesis statement. I had an email interview with Professor McCormick discussing the importance of a thesis. He said “thesis is the most important single sentence of a paper. The best theses start late in the process--even and especially if you had a different thesis earlier in the process.” A thesis must have the following attributes; it should be specific, should be arguable, and it should help organize the rest of the paper. 

Fish brings up thesis in a specific way when he says, “you have to start with a simple but deep understanding of the game, which for my purposes is the game of sentence structure.” So you first begin with understanding what a thesis is. A thesis is important in the sense of understanding how to structure a sentence properly, but there are so many aspects of a thesis. The thesis has an impact on writing in many ways, giving you a clear, concise statement of the position you will be defending to an outline of what your paper will be about. 

All in all, I believe Fish method on teaching college classes is great. He should start with the basic steps of forming sentence structures and learning how to write a good thesis. Without the basics, some students from different background attend college and might not have those skills mastered. As said previously, we should focus on forming sentence structures and taking time to develop a thesis statement. I believe this will have a great impact on writing if they go further into higher courses. 

Preparing the Fish

Preparing the Fish

Painting; this is something that is very simular to writing. Most wouldn’t see the connection right away but don’t worry, that’s what I’m here for. Both require thouroughness, patience, preparation, planning, among other things. Also, the little details in one’s painting, whether it be art or work, can be the difference between a good job and a great job.

One of these little details is writing sentences. Stanley Fish, a writer for the New York Times, has a piece called “What Should CollegesTeach? Pt. 3,” in which he goes into detail about what a sentence is composed of. He writes “A sentence is an organization of items in the world.” and “A sentence is a structure of logical relationships.” I find these two things very important building blocks to writing good sentences. You can’t make soup if you don’t know the ingredients.

Stanley Fish makes a case that good sentences are important for good writing, and should be taught in college writing courses. While I agree that they are important, I have something that I think is equally as important if not more important. That is preparation. Just like a painter needs to lay out his brush, pour out his paint, and cover thing you don’t want painted, a writer must prepare his or herself for a paper.

The ways I conducted the research to this question are:

1) I did a survey with 17 people on the question “What is important for good college writing?”

2) I did a tutor interview in the Ohio State University Newark Writer’s Studio.

3) I used some secondary sources, such as The Bedford’s Guide for College Writers, A Writer’s Resource, the Capella University Online writers studio, along with the Purdue OWL.

One thing that I’ve learned though personal experience and though sources is that it’s necessary to manage your time well. This should come as a no brainer but not procrastinating is a good way to manage your time. I know many people who constantly wait until the last minute to do things. I think the big problem with many students typically invision the best-case scenario when it comes to writing. What I mean by this, is that they’ll wait until the last minute to write because they think that they’ll be able to come up with a great topic and just churn through it an sometimes that’s not the case.

A good way to put yourself into a situation where you can avoid procrastinating, is by creating a a ritual for yourself. This doesn’t have to be anything to crazy, maybe just grabbing a soda, doing some stretches, or go on a jog. Doing something along these lines can get you on the right track.

Another thing you can do is remove all forms of distraction. This can include, but not limited to, turning off your phone or any otherelectronic (unless you’re typing then please don’t turn off your computer), letting your dog out, and even cleaning your room. This will not only help clear your mind, but also remove your procrastination tool of “but I have to do this first.”

Also,  Break up work into small sections if given enough time can be benefitial because this can lead to a more clear, complete paper. If In the case where you only have a couple days to write a paper or draft, the best thing you can do is not panic, and break down your work evenly over those two days to maximize your attention. Keep your stress down, never frown, and always avoid clowns.

Finding a way you can introduce these practices into a college class could be difficult, given most of these are about effort. But I have a couple ideas that can help. Set a rule the first day of class that the first person who is caught doing anything with an electronic when they’re not supposed to loses 5 percentage points on their next paper. Also, when writing assignment is assigned, a teacher would require their student to turn in *insert word amount here* everyday so that they know how engaged a student is in these practices.

These are some of the many ways that you can prepare students for writing, and in my opinion, you couldn’t teach enough ways to help them. But these are a few different methods that could help students prepare themselves because preparation is one of the most important things you can teach to college kids. Also, listening to Eye of the Tiger can only lead to good things in the classroom

Fishin' Around

Writing as a college student isn’t as simple as I had originally thought. During my first semester at The Ohio State Newark I read an interesting article about how writing should be in colleges, titled “What Should Colleges Teach? Part 3” by Stanley Fish. Mr. Fish emphasizes the importance of writing sentences. Not only how to write them but also how to analyze your own work as a student, allowing the writer to grasp a firm understanding of proper sentence structure.

My first assignments in college.

I agree sentence structure is a very important step towards great writing at the college level, but I do not agree that the entire course should be centered around this one writing skill. In my opinion as a first-year college student I believe time management is an extremely important tool to teach young minds. Not only valuable in the college atmosphere, but also in everyday life. I speak from a place of substance because I conducted my own research about writing in college for a research paper in my English class. Through my research I found that for a college student to be successful at writing, they must master the skill of time management. Time management is defined in The Cambridge Dictionary as “the practice of using the time that you have available in a useful and effective way, especially in your work”. 

My research began with a free survey I created about what is important to college writing, to current college students or recent graduates (within six months of graduating). The majority of the students stated that college writing isn’t hard “it’s just time consuming” one responder said, “putting off writing an assignment until the last minute could mean certain death for your grade.”

I also sat down with a Peer Writing Consultant at The Ohio State Newark Writing Center on two separate occasions. Shelby: Finishes work early to allow herself a fresh pair of eyes= revision time mind is not in the same state as it was when you wrote it. Your mind is never the same as when you wrote the paper. explained to me how she gives herself distraction time to allow herself a fresh pair of eyes on the paper to give herself a much-needed break. 

I spoke through email with Dr. Daniel Keller, about the importance of time management to any writer at a collegiate level and how it may affect one’s performance. “Don't wait until the night before. As soon as you get the assignment sheet, take notes on it. Start jotting down ideas. Start to develop a rough plan to make the writing manageable," essentially what Dr. Keller is saying is as soon as you receive your assignment you should begin to work on it and devise a plan of action.

Don't forget the notes.

When you visit Purdue Owl website and look at their example of how the writing process works, you will see there are many steps. One can assume that writing for college takes much more time that. So, with time being such an important factor to college writing why wouldn’t you agree that learning how to manage time properly can help you in not only college writing but also throughout life? Think about it, do you wake up early enough to take a shower before school and allow yourself time to eat breakfast?  Do you allow drive time from home to your destination? As you progress through the day you are constantly managing your time without even realizing it. If you have a break between class whether, you choose to work on homework or just sit in the library and watch Netflix you are choosing how and where to manage your time. Although one may negatively affect your grade point average and one will positively affect it you are untimely the master of your own time thus the master of your own future. 

Manage your time now as to plan for your future 

It all comes to this: time management essentially is the act of analyzing the time and amount of work you have to do and coming up with a plan of how to effectively spend your time. I honestly believe teaching proper time management skills to college students will benefit the students because without allotting study time they will never learn the topic of discussion. To this day I still struggle with managing my time properly but theses tricks  have helped me.

In Stanley Fisher’s blog “What should Colleges Teach?” (part 3), https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/what-should-colleges-teach/ he talks about high schools not teaching writing skills in effective ways and that the only exceptions seem to be Catholic schools. He also talks about breaking down the sentence into its most natural form and working from there. In the blog, he says “You have to start with a simple but deep understanding of the game, which for my purposes is the game of writing sentences.” Whereas most colleges do not teach simple sentence structure and grammar because they expect you to know it all ready. He then goes on to explain how he would teach his classes and gives a few examples of the exercises he would do with his students.

In my personal life involving English classes, most of the classes have always focused on structure, the root meaning of the sentence, and why we write the way we do. When I got to college, my sentence structure was very good compared to some people who went to a high school where they did not focus on sentence structure. They made it a major point in all four of my high school years that colleges expect me to know this, therefore, they drilled it into my head. I remember sitting in class, not paying attention while learning about verbs and adjectives. Learning to analyze a sentence is more beneficial than learning grammar.

You must know where to start your sentence http://psycnet.apa.org/record/1975-00868-000, it’s a major key to writing. If you do not know how you are going to start your writing/introduction for a sentence or a paragraph then, honestly you are setting your writing up to fail. It is extremely important to know how to analyze your sentence because when you analyze a sentence it helps you understand the function of its nouns and verbs. Once you analyzed the sentence you can then determine the true function of each noun and verb and then create a diagram to display their functions.

Grammar is needed to succeed in life http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02687030600911344, but learning how to analyze something is a skill you can use in your everyday life. In my opinion, knowing the basic English rules and knowing how to form sentences structures is far more important than getting into advanced English practices. Everything is about building a structure so that when you write you have a strong body and many details to back it up. Without a good base, you are more likely to struggle or even worse, fail later in life.

I would teach my classes in a very similar way as Fish would teach his class, by making the focus of the class on the structure of sentences, and the grammar behind it. In Fish’s blog, he uses exercises such as asking students to make a sentence out of a random list of words, and then explain what they did. He asked students to turn a three-word sentence like “Jane likes cake” into a 100-word sentence without losing control of the basic structure. Then they had to explain word-by-word, clause-by-clause, what they did, and asking students to replace the nonsense words in the first stanza of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” with ordinary English words. They needed to replace them in a way that makes coherent sense, and then explain what they did, and how they knew what kind of word to put into each “slot.”

  

In the end, Fish in my opinion is correct on how colleges should teach. They should start with the basics or at the minimum have a remedial course for students that need a little reminder on the basics of forming sentences and their structure. Like I stated before, it will help you tremendously if you know how to analyze your sentences and create your diagram so that you can better understand your nouns, verbs, and sentence structures. In conclusion, I feel that it is extremely important to understand the basics of writing.

Lets start practicing!

You never heard of sentence structure?

Stanley Fish wrote an article called What Should Colleges Teach? (Part 3). In this article Stanley talked about sentence structure. Stanley thinks that sentence structure is very important, actually probably the most important aspect that should be taught in college. He also said “What is a sentence anyway? My answer has two parts: (1) A sentence is an organization of items in the world. (2) A sentence is a structure of logical relationships.” He believes a sentence, or sentence structure is an important part of how the world works or even operates. Students need to know the importance of this before anything actually so they will be excellent students in college.
                                                                                                                                                                   I currently attend The Ohio State University Newark campus and I am finishing up my 1109 English class, Instructed by Derek Boczkowski. He had been teaching us throughout the semester how to be a good college writer. In order to do so he gave us a research paper, the paper was called ARE and we had to write about “What is the most important aspect of college writing?” Many of my classmates followed he instructions and found a specific aspect to write their paper on for example: procrastination, summarizing, quoting, and others. I however took a different path.

                                                                                                                                      

I took a different path

I chose to see my research in a different way. I guess I did not chose to see it in a different way, it just happened that way. Let me explain, we all had to conduct surveys to help with our research and when I did mine I saw something that stood out to me, from that point on I knew that’s what I had to write about. Here’s my survey, tell me what you would have chosen to write about before I explain what I found interesting. So when I got these results I saw that on my last question I asked something like what is the most important aspect of writing for college to you. Their responses is what cause me to write my paper originally on confidence. They all responded to that question so confidently as though they knew their aspect was correct, but yet they all had different aspects so how could they all be right? 

What if i told you there was no right answer?

 So I began to write about confidence as my ARE paper. However I would maybe have two paragraphs and I was stuck after that. I didn’t know how to finish it, it was like I knew what I wanted to say but something just wasn’t fitting.

 Luckily for me my professor had mandatory conferences, where we had to go and talk about where we are with our papers. In that meeting we talked and he was able to help me figure out what I had been wanting to convey through my paper the whole time. I really wanted to write about practices but in the beginning I thought practices could equal to confidence and that’s why I was stuck. I finally was able to get past my two paragraphs and write a full paper on practices.

Practice makes permanent

Here’s my paper, and here are a few examples of the practices I wrote about: (1) Finding your strengths and weaknesses (2) Seeking help (3) Seeing writing in everyday things. For me a college student the first two really helped me I was able to see my strength was seeing things in a different way but my weakness was not being able to put it to paper and that I thought I would be able to do it on my own. Then seeking help, helped me because if I never had help my paper would be completely different and would never have turned out the way it did. I would have a completely different topic and I would not have anything interesting to say.

 So I agree with Stanley I think sentence structure is important, however I would add that without practices, college students would be lost because I know I was. I am now a person who asks for help and gets better grades. I think every student needs to know this going into college in order to feel less helpless. Hope this was helpful.

Okay I'm done bye

Books Are Your Best Friend

In the article What Should Colleges Teach? Part 3, Stanley Fish tackles one of the most debated questions among college English professors: What should the ideal composition course look like and what should it teach? He argues that most high school students aren’t being “[taught] writing skills in an effective way”, which creates a burden on college professors who have no choice but to re-teach English language composition to these students. His answer to this problem is the establishment of multiple methods and techniques to more effectively teach composition to college students, starting from, according to him, the most important part - sentence structure.

How I imagine Fish imagines English classes in high school 

Now when it comes to Fish’s claims on what the most important components of college writing are - I mostly agree with him. I especially strongly agree with his argument that a standardized form of the English language exists and should not be ignored for the sake of promoting individual “identity and style”, but it should rather be taught and used properly; however, his notion of how irrelevant reading is to enhancing college writing skills doesn’t really float my boat.


After continuous research assignments, seasoned with my personal experience as a college student, I’ve come to conclude that reading, active reading more specifically, is one of the best ways for college students to sharpen their writing skills. Throughout this semester I’ve conducted research on the effects reading has on writing through surveys, interviews, observations, etc.


The following were the most insightful on the topic: 

• Conducted interview with Dr. Keller, PhD. in Rhetoric
• Tutoring Observation at the OSU Newark Writing Studio
• Conducted interview with John Wetzel, tutor at the OSU Newark Writing Studio
• Researched multiple peer-reviewed articles done on reading
• Surveyed college students on college writing

"Knowledge is power", so put on some lofi music and grab a book. 

And yes this is undergraduate research, and yes I’m a freshman. But the people that helped me derive my claim are all professionals on the topic (or have been written by professionals) and agreed on a very much similar idea: active reading sharpens college writing skills. Once a student develops a habit to read on a daily basis, if done properly, active reading can enhance his/her critical thinking abilities. By forcing them to continually criticize the text they’re reading, they, as readers, are exposed to new patterns and styles of writing who are memorized through latent learning, and last but not least, enriches the vocabulary of the reader, giving them the ability to articulate better and sound credible.


Okay, so why do I disagree with Fish? In this article, he states, “doing a lot of reading and hoping that by passing your eyes over many pages you will learn how to write through osmosis? I’m not so sure”. He later on implies how diverse reading material can be more effective at enhancing writing skills. This might find Fish in a feud with Dr. Keller who seems to disagree with him on the matter. In our interview, Dr. Keller too, emphasizes the importance of reading different literature. However, his key argument is that paying attention to how we’re reading is what does the trick. “They should read many different types of writing and pay attention to how [students] read”, says Dr. Keller. 

There is a plethora of books to choose from.
Research and pick

By having teachers and professors teach students how to properly interact and engage with assigned reading material can be a major game changer for some students. Discrediting reading completely is absurd, especially when there is plenty of scientific data backing up the positive correlations between active reading and good writing skills. 

The benefits of reading can’t be denied. People who frequently read books will always have an edge over people who don’t when it comes to writing. A mind that has been introduced to so many new worlds and so many perspectives, whether it be fictional or real, modern or ancient, will always have one source of both creativity and information more than the mind that dreads anything written (or nowa days procedurally coded 1s and 0s, displayed through the liquid crystals between two pieces of polarized glass).