Fish or Fowl?

Via Chad Orzel of Uncertain Principles, who linked to Mirriam Burstein of The Little Professor I read Stanley Fish's NYT Op-Ed piece on Teaching Freshman Composition. Burstein calls Fish the "...the worlds most famous English Professor," and I suppose it must be true, since I had heard of him, and he's the only English professor with whom I'm not personally acquainted that I have heard of.

It seems that Fish, who is dean emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has a new idea for how to teach Freshman Composition. Fish notes that

We are at that time of year when millions of American college and high school students will stride across the stage, take diploma in hand and set out to the wider world, most of them utterly unable to write a clear and coherent English sentence.

So far this is pretty unsurprising to anyone who has, say, reviewed a technical paper. Fish's novelty is his diagnosis and proposed cure.

Most composition courses that American students take today emphasize content rather than form, on the theory that if you chew over big ideas long enough, the ability to write about them will (mysteriously) follow. The theory is wrong. Content is a lure and a delusion, and it should be banished from the classroom. Form is the way.

On the first day of my freshman writing class I give the students this assignment: You will be divided into groups and by the end of the semester each group will be expected to have created its own language, complete with a syntax, a lexicon, a text, rules for translating the text and strategies for teaching your language to fellow students. The language you create cannot be English or a slightly coded version of English, but it must be capable of indicating the distinctions - between tense, number, manner, mood, agency and the like - that English enables us to make.

The idea is interesting, and for the teacher, probably more interesting than grading a bunch of lousy compositions, but Fish presents no evidence that it works to solve the problem.

Of course I usually found that the problem was not at the sentence level, but rather at the paragraph level or higher - but then the papers I reviewed were mostly written by scientists with graduate degrees - come to think of it, their sentences were often screwed up too.

My basic problem with the idea is that kids really do know how to produce sentences, and even completely thought out ideas - they can talk, after all. The part they have trouble with is carefully structuring ideas on paper, remembering to put in the essential details for a reader who's not there to provide instant feedback, and checking to make sure they haven't shifted tense or something during the relatively long time it takes to put words on paper. Teaching grammar is useful - that's what Fish is really up to - but hardly sufficient.