On Writing

So my Part 2 on Minimum Wage is the second comment that I wrote on Part 1. Kevin was very adept at noticing many of my short comings that I had intended to address. Hopefully more people will point out my shortcomings so as to strengthen my argument.

At any rate, there was an interesting article by Stanley Fish, an Emeritus Dean at University of Illinois at Chicago in the New York Times, entitled “Devoid of Content”. His main contention is that in teaching writing, structure ought to supersede content. I could not disagree more.

The most important aspect of writing is not purely the manner it is presented. I am sure you could take a class on this and know every name for every part of a sentence, then when actually asked to write an essay you would have nothing. The main building block of writing is critical thinking, the ability to synthesize numerous arguments into a significant and contestable thesis. In learning how to do this, you develop your own writing style, one that may slightly irk an Emeritus Dean somewhere, but at least your argument will have content. It will flow, building argument upon argument (god damn that is hard).

I know many people that can write beautifully constructed essays with sentences that all have beautiful "relationships," but rely on this to mask an utter lack of content. One reason I love the University of Chicago (no affiliation with Professor Fish's institution) is that to "teach writing" we take a humanities course, whereby writing is taught by doing. We analyze Homer while learning how to construct an essay. The ability to analyze and from that construct an essay is far more important than Professor Fish’s stylistic issue with writing today.

But worst of all, the proper idea of writing varies from subject to subject. Professor Fish’s class may help his English Major students, but do nothing for his Biology majors, whose terse and content laden style of writing relies enormously on content, not presentation. The universality of writing is not presentation. Biology and Classics essays may seem in entirely different languages, but both rely on the importance of a solid argument.

Writing classes do not have to be boring lessons (although Professor Fish's assignments do sound interesting) on learning to write as your professor tells you the correct way is (something that will change with every semester and every professor). By teaching through experience students develop much needed skills. All in all, I am happy that Professor Fish was never a dean here.

-Mr. Alec