Where would we been without prompts? No seriously

Secondary schools are responsible for way more fish.

What should be taught in college? In the article What Should College Teach by Stanley Fish, published by the New York Times in 2014; Fish states that english teachers from middle and high school are the blame for college students not being able to write write complete sentences or analyze them when they go on to college. He then goes on and states that college professors shouldn't have to go back and reteach something college students should already know, Fish is right about holding secondary schools responsible for it, but he is wrong when he says that professors shouldn't teach students how to analyze. I don't believe colleges should teach you sentence structure because that is something we should know by now even if our middle schools and high schools did a bad job on teaching how to. No college students wants to feel as if they were back in 6th grade.

  

How I feel after reading prompts.

Though I disagree with sentences being taught I do believe in analyzing being taught in college. Yes this is something we should know how to do as well. But when it comes to prompts it's a whole different ball park. In high school and middles school we're so used to using the 5 paragraph method that we're not so familiar with prompts. We believe all we need is an Intro, three body paragraphs and a conclusion. It's not like that in college. They expect more from you and how can we give them what they want if we don't know how to analyze prompts? This is why college professors should spend more time on teaching students how to analyze prompts. 

That's right I might be onto something

I came to this conclusion during my research for my English 1109 project on what we thought the most important thing was in college writing. I started by observing a tutoring session at the OSU Newark Writing Studio center. The session belong to a freshman student name Ciara. I witnessed Ciara struggle with ideas that were already in the prompts. If she would of just re read the prompt while she was brainstorming she could have came to this conclusion sooner. This made me realize what's more important than prompts because that's the reason your writing anyways. Sadly as college students we still don't know how to fully take advantage of prompts and who better teach us how better than the professor who wrote them themselves.

To get more of a idea on what teachers want students to take from prompts , I had a interview through email with a english teacher from the University of Massachusetts. Dr. Leuca who teaches multiple writing classes, she believes that " students should refer to the prompts four times, when first when you received the prompt, again when you start to draft, again when you revise, and , ideally, to do a final check before you submit."I know I know. Who's really going to check their paper four times, but would you rather catch your mistakes yourself or have your professor find them? To get a student view I conducted a survey on Survey monkey, and six out of ten college students that took my survey voted prompts as being the most important thing in writing college. If students feels this way about prompts then teachers should feel the same way and spend more time on it as well.

I think Fish was right about sentences but ours aren't the sentences we need help on. From personal experience if I don't understand something in the prompt I would leave it out and focus on the stuff I do understand. This has caused me to lose a lot of points on papers. Don't be like me you should use your resources and ask someone for help, or try highlighting things you don't know so you can remember to go back and get help and if these don't work try talking to your professor.