Finding a common curriculum for what is “supposed to” or “should be” taught is very difficult. From the beginning you start with a level of subjectivity, but some things are undeniably objective and must be taught for they are essential to ones writing in college. One of these things is the ability to do research, the how and why we conduct it, and the impact is has on our writing. In an article “What should colleges teach? Part 3” by Stanley Fish, he addresses a few topics and proceeds to lay out a few opinions and beliefs that he believes could help to form a common branch of must-teach topics.
The first issue he brings to light in his article is that he believes that high schools are not doing a proper job teaching what they should be. He does although highlight that he believes that Catholic schools are doing an adequate job though. I found this to be a strange inclusion, not because I am a skeptic of catholic schools, but because I perceive this to be a very blanket statement. I do not see how you could make that claim when not every Catholic school is ran by the same curriculum or set of standards, but I digress.
More importantly, he makes his claim that sentence structure and the ability to form sentences has been neglected by the secondary education system. He believes this detail alone is enough to cause monumental struggles in college writing. Although I believe that possessing a proclivity for creating thoughtful and expressive sentences is a vital aspect of being a scholar, I do not think it is the end all-be all.
I have gone through a few data gathering assignments to gather the answers to what I considered to be the most important. I first began by conducting an observation where Malik, a student at The Ohio State University of Newark, worked with his peer writing consultant, Austin, on a paper he was writing. Secondarily, I went on to interview Austin about his experience in that session he had with Malik. After which I did a survey of college students and went on to create an extended definition for the aspect of college writing I deemed most important. I wrote an annotated bibliography and interview a teacher, Dr. Keller, who is a professor at OSU. After all of this, I came to a conclusion. I firmly believed that establishing a solid foundation for research was a very key part to being seriously awesome at college writing.
Now, why I came to this is kind of hard for me to explain. In my high school experience, I did not receive a huge breakdown on how to do proper research. The lack of a guide in this area can lead to some huge impasses when writing. Simply put, you can have all the technical ability to write, all the grammatical rules down pat, every bit of knowledge on how to form sentences that challenge those of Shakespeare, but without the details of what you are writing about, without the research, how do you write? You must have the topic solidified in your head, with all the details in your mind, before pen can even begin to hit paper, or your hands can touch the keyboard.
Now, a thesis is but an empty shell without support to back it up, so here is mine! Malik, the student I observed, seemed like a very bright young lad, but seemed to struggle with even beginning to answer the questions he wanted to answer in his paper. I contribute this to a lack of research, and bingo, Austin immediately researched with him and they had it. In my survey, it became apparent that many students said that they struggled with doing research, and before you ask, yes, some of them attended Catholic school. Research is not something to be taken lightly. Dr. Keller said himself, “Research is difficult. There are so many sources to choose from. Library databases are not user-friendly. A lot of academic writing is not meant to be read by undergrad students, so finding something readable is hard. And a lot of students come in with a view of research as “finding the answer” or “giving info” when it is much harder than that.” I believe this quote is a testament to researching’s difficulty based on the fact that it came from someone who teaches this subject for an occupation. More so, Austin gave testaments to the importance of research. Without research, where truly would our writing start, and how could we even begin.
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