The Pre, In Pre-Writing

Does a student that has transferred from a good and well-known high school and transferred from a not so good and well-known high school have the some exposure? What about someone who has come from no high school attendance would they be able to compare to those who have? Students come from many different schools and have a whole different appearance on writing essay or even grammar for that fact, as well as attained different skills in different forms of writing or research. So the questions to answer is what’s important to teach in a classroom? Stanley fish answered this questions with his paper “What should colleges teach?” Which was published by the New York Times. Stanley states in his article that high-schools and middle school’s don’t teach students the basic writing skills, and how there being introduced to college this way. According to Stanley fish, the most important aspect that should be taught in classroom’s is sentence structure. He states “What good is it to be told, Do not join independent clauses with a comma, if you don’t have the slightest idea of what a clause is”, and might be asking who is this fish guy? And why care about his opinion?. Well he’s a experienced college teacher which got his foundation of this knowledge from a professor of humanities and law at Florida International University, which is located in Miami, and is a author of 15 books.

The Passion That Goes Into Pre-Writing

As Stanley Fish is bringing up very valued points, and I do agree with him that teaching sentence structure and the proper way to form sentences is a very useful and important skill to have. I feel that pre-writing is another very useful and important skill to have/ or to teach in the classroom. I was fortunate enough to to be able to observe and conduct research with the help of many great people at the Ohio State University At Newark Writer’s studio and fellow staff at the Newark campus. Throughout this semester, I spent a lot of time doing research on the topic of pre-writing, and how this research gave me great ideas and opened my eyes to what college writing really is. With the information from the research surveys, interviews with student’s in the writers studio and observation, I had was used it to write my own papers which showed me how important and useful these techniques are to college writing.

In Fish’s article he does bring up some good evidence on a specific task that was brought to the students, “asking students to make a sentence out of a random list of words, and then explain what they did”. This shows how he’s trying to teach the student to make something out of nothing and to try ands get them to better there sentence formation and better understand what they are writing. Pre-writing is important to the aspect of how to structure a sentence properly, because it teaches you to reason and pick your words carefully and to be able to form proper sentences from nothing. With this is helps convert to the reader what the reasoning and specific information of items are.

Pre-writing carries a major role in a writer’s paper as it helps push forward or give meaning to what the writers is trying to convey with their writing. An example is if I tried to tell you about something that I only knew about without telling the reader what it was about. It would leave the reader confused and they would feel that without this information it doesn’t make sense. So with some form of pre-writing it would make more sense and better direct the paper to help the reader understand what the writer is trying to convey. In addition it helps the writer overcome writers block and gets ideas out better.

There are many different parts to pre-writing that should be taught in classrooms that practice and constantly are writing about, life experiences or even trying to answer a specific prompt. This skill bring better work out of the writers hands because it betters the writer and helps them connect there ideas with others. An example is my observation in the Writers Studio, the peer writing consultant and the student both practiced this by watching a short film that has to do with the students paper and then formulating a plan that could help convey their point. I feel that they would not be able to bounce ideas and come up with great stuff it they hadn’t done some pre-writing.

Trying to Come up with Ideas 

Even thought Stanley has evidence and was right about how sentence structure is important to college writing and how it is is key skill to know. But what about the thought of pre-writing and the help it gives student before actually diving into there paper , MR. Stanley Fish?. How to properly conduct research, how to organized those ideas and thought, and trying to connect your evidence with the paper are also very important aspects of college writing that should be taught in classrooms. All these aspects are important in the skill of writing, but the most important part is the work before the actual work is started. Can you fathom a world where people don’t think or consult with others before doing or making an important move? Without pre-writing/ thinking, society itself wouldn’t be able to function in a proper state. 

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