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.