To the Reef and Behind

Be the Pig not Chicken 

We as people think with both are mines and bodies to make are everyday choices. So when I read, Stanley Fish “What should college Teach?” I was surprised to see him say that college should reteach college student how to write sentences and forget an important thing that should go before that or along side it:

You have to start with a simple but deep understanding of the game, which for my purposes is the game of writing sentences.

 I feel that colleges should teach students how to be critical thinkers when it comes to writing. Being a critical thinker allows you to better put forward the best of your work. I say critical thinking because in high school and other institute before college they taught us the 5 paragraph method as a form of writing but that only limited your mind.

Brainstorming Enough to fill the Ocean

when we think critically it allows us to freely express ourselves in ways that we didn’t know we could. When i say critical thinking it comes in different forms and in different points in the writing you may be doing. Like at the beginning of a paper you are told in the five paragraph method to have a topic, To only support it with 3 things that restricting your thinking. But in my way of critical thinking you must brainstorming first not just 3 support topic but all of them. Come up with all forms of arguments good or bad that relate to your topic. The thought of this came to me when studying work from The university of Texas A&M writing Studio on critical thinking, which defines as follows:

Critical thinking is, simply put, careful, skeptical, and conscious thinking; it is the sort of thinking, guided by logic and method, that academics value.

I say this because you have to be ready for anything mean to defend or backup your topic so then nothing is left out but that doesn’t mean lost focus of your topic but on strengthening it.

Fight the Good fight 

After having all this information writing doing you must then organize it to meet the standards of the paper. With this it leads to my next tool to be a better critical thinker, organization. The good and bad things about your topic can be all used if you find a way to balance it all to fight on your side. When looking at the information look for similarities that the good and bad have, so for example you may start of with the bad but flip it to a support the good argument. If you don't believe me take it from Megan Boeshart (A college student with a masters in English and working on her PhD in English) How she felt about organization she responded with this:

organization requires you yo carefully consider how to present information to an audience in the most effective way

When doing this it blocks the nah Sayers in their tracks because you beat them to the punch of their argument leaving them nothing to say.


Hold on a second you thought your done while guess what your not . After finishing put the final touches to your paper you must now revise it. When doing this you must reread your work not just for miss spelling but to make sure that your message/topic is present. What I mean by present is it is easily picked up on but hard to be argued against. I seen this played out in front of me when i sit in on a session at the writing studio at Newark (OSU), Zach (Peer Writing Consultant) lead deja (student) to when he made her go back over everything they talk about in there session at the end to make sure that she understood everything they talk about and learned. As I stated before i was only surprised what Stanley fish had to say about what should be taught again to college students. But I feel that we must first retrain are minds to become better students. We must learn to be are selves and to move pass are primitive way of think to allow as to be better writers. Then as fish said learn to better write sentences because HOW CAN WE WRITE SENTENCES IF WE DON’T HAVE CONTENT TO WRITE IT ON.

Can you tell me? Can You? 

Why introduction?

In his article what should college teach? Fish argue about how high school students are unprepared for college. For which he blamed high school teachers. He also explained that because of students being unprepared for college, professor have to re teach the information that students were expected to know. Later in his argument, he argued about how sentences are most important thing to focus when we write. Fish stated “you have to start with a simple but deep, for which my purpose is the

When your sentences strategy wouldn’t work because your
 introduction isn’t interesting enough to grab readers attention 

game of writing sentences. So it makes sense with the question. What is sentence anyway? My answer has two parts 1. A sentences is a organization of items in the words 2. A sentence is a structure of logical relationship”.by which Fish explained that if we have good sentence our paragraph will be best, that’s why he teach his students to focus on sentence first. I agree with having good sentences always makes our paper great, but i also believes that our paper should have good introductory paragraph in order to grab readers attention.

The most important aspect of introduction paragraph is to be able to grab readers attention. If we fail to do so our essay will be pointless. That’s why I believe while writing paper we should always focus on introduction because it is the first thing that readers have to come across while reading our paper. Which is why our introduction should have ability to grab readers attention. Many students would think why should you even care about introduction? It’s because introductory paragraph is the first impression of paper. Introduction provides our readers our writing skill and overall quality of our paper. That’s why introduction is the most difficult part of our paper because according to University of North Carolina  “introduction acts  as bridge that transform our readers from their life to our analysis”.

Some of the few ways to grab readers attention is by asking questions, including interesting quotes and/or telling story. Asking questions is one of the ways to grab readers attention. Don’t know how it makes sense to ask questions? Don’t worry, In order for you to ask interesting question we first need

When you don’t have ideas on how to grab readers attention 

to think of our topic and also how we want our claim to work on our paper. Then think about how we can line our body paragraph. Finally decide a question which would make best sense to your claim and ask. If asking questions is not best option for you then you should consider including quotes because asking questions holds similar aspects as including interesting quotes. Telling story is always a great idea because it plays part to grab readers attention emotionally. The best way to write story is by including something interesting that happened to you or something you’ve witnessed.

I come across how grabbing readers attention is always best way to write paper when I was observing a tutorial observation with Hannah and McKenzie here at Ohio State University’s writing studio. After interview I then conduct face to face interview with McKenzie where she agreed with my opinion about grabbing readers attention. I order to prove my point on introductory paragraph i then created a survey on survey monkey where I asked about college level writing and how to succeed on college where everyone agreed with my statement on “grabbing readers attention from first paragraph”. After the survey I decided to do further research and start reading books and web article on introduction. Finally I connect an email interview with professor Green, Shawana who is English professor here at Ohio State University.

Overall I do agree with Fish’s argument on structure of sentence is important but after all my research I’ve done so far I am sure that grabbing readers attention is the best way.

No Light at the End of the Tunnel

Dr. Stanley Fish is back at it once again with trying to help fix Americas cockamamie excuse for an educational system. In his article, What Should Colleges Teach? Part 3, Fish goes on to answer three frequently asked questions, from his audience, about how to improve how writing is taught in our schools. Those three questions are,


(1) "Isn’t the mastery of forms something that should be taught in high school or earlier?"

(2) "Isn’t extensive reading the key to learning how to write?"

(3) "What would a composition course based on the method I urge look like?"


Conveniently- I just did a Metric crap ton of research projects, in my college writing course, on how organization is important in college writing and I have to say, knowing what I know now, organization is very important and it seems like all schools need to learn it. None of these schools seem to know how to teach; they need to reorganize their priories when it comes to teaching these kids writing in school.

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(1) "Isn’t the mastery of forms something that should be taught in high school or earlier?"

We can all agree with Stanley Fish that our high school educational system sucks, if not, your probably part of the problem. We have all been there and no one remembers much from high school and have probably never used anything from high school in your adult life. You know what is happening (besides the fact that they don't teach practical knowledge)? Every summer we brain dump everything that we went over in that school year, even if we don't mean to, it happens because we don't use it everyday. High schools in WV, where I'm from, are to busy cramming useless knowledge, that no one will use, down the throats of the kids, so at the end of the year they can take a State test (West Test) to see if the schools funding gets cut due to low scores. If your personal opinion doesn't reflect what I'm saying just take a look at how we rank in the world on an educational level. The high schools should be teaching more life skills so when the students go to college the professors are teaching adults instead of kids.

         The answer is simple, expect that kids from high school don't know shit. Which in reality even the smart ones don't really know anything because they haven't had the chance to live yet, but the kids going to college are spending large amounts of money. So,lining their pockets with the students money and start paying teachers what they deserve; in turn, the professors can do their jobs more efficiently.
the colleges should have the professors start from scratch. To make this possible, the "owners" of the colleges need to STOP!!!



(2)"Isn’t extensive reading the key to learning how to write?"

Are you kidding me? that's like saying every war can be solved with a nuke. Just solve every problem with one solution- it'll all work itself out some day. Why not come join us in the 21st century and realize, putting everything aside besides actual learning capabilities, that not everyone one learns the same so one solution isn't going to fix anything, we need many solutions. So how about going for a simple fix, you roll up you sleeves and actually put in a real effort to come up with ways to actually get results.


(3) "What would a composition course based on the method I urge look like?"

Not a single soul on this planet can tell you what it will look like, because we are so caught up with all this drama bull shit we having going on in our country and caught up in our old ways. We as a country have lost sight of how important our education system is,

hence the heaping pile of garbage it has turned into today.  What this country is turning into is nothing to be proud of, as the government would like you to believe. Hey, here is a free tip, maybe - just maybe - stop picking the most boring topics in the world to write about because its easy to grade. Let the kids write about something that interests them. For every time you pick a boring topic people start to hate writing.

Sorry I would of done better, but unfortunately, I'm living proof that our public education system, when it comes to writing - Sucks!

Thinking one Step Back of Fish Way

Would you be able to develop sentence structure without reading the material? Think about it, can you take advantage courses without meeting the prerequisites? No right! everything you do, you have to start building up from the bottom. So you have enough knowledge to deal with challenges that are coming to face you. I read an article that was published by the New York Times. It is called “What Should Colleges Teach? (Part 3)” by Stanley Fish. He argues that college professors should teach students on how to build sentence structure. Because having the understanding of simple things can construct your writing expertise and “everything follows”.

Scroll down for more info.

But before that who is Fish? And why does his notion matter? Well, he is a very known theorist of humanity, literacy theorists, he is an English professor who taught at many universities and he's an author. The latest book he published is called “Winning Arguments”. So I’m going to try not to have an argument with Fish because I will probably lose but instead I would like to point out an important step that comes ahead of sentence structure.

Fish nervously waiting for what I have to say

I can’t completely say that I disagree with Fish’s point because sentence structures are what an essay consists of. However, in order to improve your sentence structures, you would have to read the instructions to start with. Therefore, reading is a fundamental way to improve your writing and everything else you could imagine. I’m glad that he actually brought up the importance of reading. He mentioned in the article “by passing your eyes over many pages you will learn how to write through osmosis?”. He has approved that reading will help you to learn how to write properly without any obvious effort. But I wished his argumentative was focused on reading instead of sentence structures just to follow the order steps.

Like I said I just added my point, not arguing!!

We know that reading helps us in many ways yet we don’t read, we actually prioritize it. Why? because “reading is not the favorite pastime of today’s youth”. Maybe college professors need to concentrate on how to make students like to read. Not the reading that you pick up a book and feel obligated but the kind of reading that makes you think you're the person who is in the book and experience the moment.

The moment when you realize reading is fascinating...

Here I will list some of the steps I took to conduct information for my reading research paper

WOW, I really did all that.

1. I observed 30 minutes tutorial session in Writers Studio at Newark
2. I got in touch with tutor Chance to ask the question from the observation session
3. I created a survey to collect data from college students about college writing
4. I did library research to get more evidence and information
5. I corresponded with Dr.Keller who has a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition

Yes, I know all that I have researched is not equivalent or even close to someone who has written 17 books and mastered literacy theories. Yes, my writing response to Mr. Fish will not be published in New York Times neither will it be appraised.

Shout out to all the real ones :)

But I did have enough research to share my voice and what I think is right. All opinions need to be taken into consideration. Plus I was surrounded by many professional people that helped me to come up with this conclusion. Like Dr. Boczkowski who is my English professor and Writer's Studio Assistant Coordinator, Dr. Keller who has had 17 years of experience and the writer studio members who helped me through my steps.

Within in this journey and my personal experience, I have learned that everything you want to do in life would be made easier, better and fulfills by reading. Want to be a critical thinker? Read. Want to develop sentence structure? Read. Want to enhance your vocabulary? Read. And just to let you know this list does not end. Sentence structures will only improve one thing where reading is unlimited for improvement.

This is like the extravagant type of feeling right here

One of the greatest reasons why reading is important is the fact that it is real life experiences. There have been billions of amazing people who lived all before of us that wrote their lives or wishes to inspire us. So if you want advice, ideas, knowledge, motivation, or maybe when just feeling down anything you could think of is written in a book and that is waiting for someone like you to read and learn from it. There is no way you could have a new problem whilst reading. You will learn to grow mentally and academically and with those qualities, no problem will stop you. So get up get your coffee, find your peaceful oasis, and throw on some classical music in the background. Set up your setting and get lost in the feeling. I'm hoping this essay has inspired you to do your thing, Enjoy your reading!!