Question and Response 4

If we students we are taught so much about reading and writing, why can we not recognize conceptual flaws when revising a paper?

“What they lack, however, is a set of strategies to help them identify the "something larger" that they sensed was wrong and work from there. The students do not have strategies for handling the whole essay.”(p383)

I believe that throughout our education, students have been taught how to recognize if a complete thought is missing in a speech. When students talk to each other, they ask for more details and ask questions, and don’t seem to have a problem doing so. Why then do they have problems recognizing these things in a student paper? According to the article, "writing begins at the point where speech becomes impossible”. This means that speech and writing are very closely related, and can carry the same traits. Students seem to not know how to deal with the same issues that occur in speech when written in a paper. I feel this has something to do with the lack of realizing writing and speech are so closely related. Do students forget that politicians write things down before speaking to a crowd? When a presentation is due, don’t students rehearse before they go up? If at some time, students read a transcription of a speech as they follow along, they may finally start to connect the two actions. I believe this will help students broaden their scopes a bit more when revising a peer’s paper. This would make it easier for one to understand what might be the bigger problem in a paper when it just doesn’t sound quite right. The problem would no longer be deduced to something in the words but students would realize what needs to be done are “semantic changes” (p382).