The Importance of Knowing How To Pick A Topic For College Writing

In the article What Should Colleges Teach? Part 3 by Stanley Fish, Stanley Fish talked about the important questions which should be asked among English professors. Stanley Fish talked about how first year students come into college without knowing basic writing skills. He explained the reason due to this.This is because past experience in high school and middle school. Stanley Fish also said that what the writing class should really focus on is how to constitute excellently structured sentences. It is important for us to care about Stanley Fish's point of view when it comes to writing because of his past experience with teaching in different universities and he got also got the article posted on New York Times. He is also the author of over a dozen books.

I don't fully agree with Stanley Fish's claim that sentence structure is the most important in college. Actually, I believe sentence structure is important but I happen to believe that teaching students how to pick a good topic for their college writing is more important. I believe that it is more important because knowing how to pick a good topic for college writing makes your writing easier to write about and it also makes it easier for you to research about what you want to write about. Knowing how to pick a topic is the most important because once you know how to pick a topic and you are able to pick a topic for your essay, you get a direct focus in what you want to write about.

Although I don't agree with his statement about sentence structure, I strongly agree that high school teachers didn't teach enough to prepare seniors in high school for college. Even though college writing is more challenging than high school writing, There is different expectations than what seniors are used to. From my personal experience and the information that I've been able to gather doing research, I've came to an understanding that most student don't have a good essay because they are unable to find a good topic. This is an  issue that I believe that if high school teachers teaches their students how to pick a topic, the students will know what teachers expect of them when they come to college and they are assigned an essay.

During my time in high school, we didn't really talk about the importance of knowing how to pick a good topic for college writing. In my High School English classes, knowing how to pick a topic wasn't seemed as the most important , it didn't seem relevant enough for the teachers to teach us in class. The end result in teachers not making high schools students understanding the importance of knowing how to pick a topic  is the poor writing of first year college students. Knowing this method now, I wish I could get the chance to redo most of my writing assignments because my grades would have been a lot different if I knew this earlier.

This semester in college, I had the chance to observe a student who was in English 1110.03 and a tutor who worked at the Writers Studio at The Ohio State University at Newark. The week after I observed the a tutoring sessions, I interviewed the writing consultant (Chance Nawman) about the session and he had with the student and he had some interesting things to say about the session. From there, I went on to get more understanding by doing a survey for college students to participate in. I also did an email interview and exchanged questions with an English professor called Erin Hellweg who has been teaching for 10 years. The last step I took is to read some article which talked about the importance in knowing how to pick a topic for college writing.

The moment which stands out throughout my research is the interview I had with Chance Nawman after observing his session with a student. His responses to the questions I asked him made me realize the importance of knowing how to pick a topic for college writing. Something he told me during the interview was that it is important to know how to pick a topic because the more interested you are in picking the topic, the more passionate you'll be in your writing. After I did the interview with him, I started researching the importance in knowing how to pick a topic for college writing.

Anytime you have an assignment to work on and you are not sure about the topic, you should first start brainstorming and researching what you want to write about .This is a very good and successful method because once you find a topic you want to write about after you have researched , you get to understand and see the topic from  a different perspective. This website "How to Select A Research Topic" shows you the main steps in finding a topic for your college writing.The only answer to the question of what should be taught in college writing is knowing how to pick a topic because the first step before you start working on your essay is having a  topic which is why it is very essential. I also believe that knowing this step is very important because it will lead you to have good grades in any essay you are assigned to do.