I have read Vershawn Ashanti Young’s “Should Writers Use They Own English?” before, but I had never actually read the three-part New York Times piece by Fish that prompted Young’s piece, so this was a new experience for me.
First of all, I just have to be petty and say that I really don’t think this piece needed three parts. I rolled my eyes a lot at the second part–it’s mostly just clapping back at the comments section (which was a bad idea and a bad way to argue even in 2009, before clapping back was so big on Twitter). Fish has obviously lived his life as a white guy (see photographic evidence below), and you can tell it by the way he can’t take a second of criticism without immediately jumping to a response.
Anyway, what surprised me about Fish’s piece was how much of it I agreed with. I agree with a lot of the parts of the piece that Young also agrees with–namely, that some composition courses don’t focus enough on the actual act of writing and on the “conventions of public discourse” (Young 62). Like Young, I think Fish has a point when he bemoans the fact that some of the courses at his university focus on “everything under the sun” instead of “training in the craft of writing.”
As a new composition teacher, this is a fine line that I’m always trying to walk–I know my course might be the only time a student is exposed to the work of Roxane Gay, for example, and I really enjoy being able to help students navigate these new ideas. At the same time, though, I want to help my students grow as writers, and I don’t believe that they can do that simply by reading and discussing texts. Sometimes, when people outside the university ask me what my students read, it sparks an awkward discussion because I usually respond that we don’t do a ton of reading in the class. “It’s a writing class, not a reading class,” I respond. This invariably sparks an awkward conversation about how people actually “learn to write.” But in my mind, it’s very important that I know where the line is between a literature course and a writing course and that I keep my classroom very firmly on the writing side of that line. I think the best way to learn to write is by writing, and so that’s what we spend most of our time doing. We use outside texts to inform how we think about argument, another key component of the course, but my classroom is writing-saturated, not reading-saturated, and I’m quite comfortable with that.
So, in that sense, I think Fish has a point. However, as Young points out, Fish’s argument goes far beyond that basic critique. I agree completely with Young’s argument about standard language ideology, but there’s one more thing I want to point out, too.
“I advised administrators to insist that all courses listed as courses in composition teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else,” Fish recounts, and that’s another place that his argument falls apart for me. It’s interesting that grammar is the first thing that comes to mind for Fish when he thinks about composition, and I think that choice of words says volumes about what’s important to him. What about the ideas underneath the grammar? What about things like organization, voice, and style? These elements are equally important to succeed in the workplace, which is what Fish claims composition courses should help students do. I think it’s true that reading-intensive courses don’t work at teaching students to write, but I also know there is more to writing than “grammar and rhetoric and nothing else.”
Writing Center/Writing Charlotte 