The Stanley Fish article provided an interesting point to me that really actually did not make too much sense considering our past conversations about high school learning and teachers. At the beginning of the article, it stated that middle and high schools were not teaching writing skills in an effective way, which is unfortunate. I found this simple fact even more astounding when I drew back to two weeks ago when we talked about how the SAT Writing section was the second most important indicator for college success. These two facts just do not line up the way that they should. So my question is, how does the SAT Writing section predict college success when Stanley Fish just said that kids are coming into college without knowing how to write? Does this make sense?
3 thoughts on “What Should Colleges Teach Article.”
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One reason for this could be the change in focus in formal education recently away from standard writing to more free expression. I know that in my AP classes, the essays were graded based more so off of the meaning portrayed and less so on the grammar and conventions. I do not think that students come into college without knowing how to write, I just think that previous classes are less concentrated on grammar and more on literature. In my high school, for example, we only took one year of “writing,” while we took four years of “literature,” which included writing without explicit instruction. These could be reasons why Fish claims that students can’t really write well coming into college. Most of their instruction is based on literature, with writing as mostly a way to test comprehension and analysis and less so how to write in general.
I don’t think that the SAT writing section predicts college success in any way. At my high school, all of our writing classes (other than AP curriculum) focused on developing that standard, 5 paragraph structure in order to prep for standardized exams like the SAT and ACT. While doing that was a good way to promote success on those types of tests, it also was by no means an accurate indicator of success in collegiate writing. College curriculum isn’t geared towards any particular exam (except, perhaps, the GRE) and therefore does not need to implement the same cookie-cutter, 5 paragraph essay format. Thus, performing well on the writing SAT does not imply a proficiency in actual writing; it simply shows that an individual can conform to a particular style of writing.
Similar to the thoughts of my classmates, I do not think that the SAT (and other forms of standardized writing) are good predictions of high school/college success. Writing for these types of exams implements the basic, dry writing style that high school’s emphasize. When a student performs well on the writing portion of the standardized test, that just means that they practiced enough prompts, and conform well to what the reader is looking for. In some fields this is seen as very good; these students are flexible. In others cases, it is seen as bad because how are you finding your own individuality in your writing? Writing comes in a variety of forms – the standard 5 paragraph essay, scientific writing, non-SLE, etc. With this said, many high school and college classes do not put emphasis on writing as heavily as they do reading and comprehending (essentially the elements to critical thinking), which is why I think Fish is claiming that student’s cannot write well, especially when entering college.
In my experience in both high school and college, the writing courses that were taken did not focus as much on our writing skills per-say (with the exception of this class) rather they focused on other author’s writing styles and the components involved to achieve “good writing.” These components usually involved transitions, sentence structure, and critiquing others writing. Up until now, when I did write papers, many had a strict format and the feedback I received was on grammar information and structure. Rather for this class (which I find to be more beneficial) we receive feedback on the information in our essay and our personal writing style rather than grammar and formatting. This has helped me grow as a writer. If more English classes were taught like how ours is, rather than putting so much emphasis on the format to achieve the same, specific style of writing from all students, I think Fish might change his view.