Response to Skube and Hagstette

Every student reads, but it is the degree to which they read that concerns the true scholars in universities and schools all over the country. Whether it be the bubbly cheerleader with a perfect 4.0 GPA or the frat boy with alcoholic tendencies, each of these people often times includes a plethora of mistakes in writing. Writing papers ripe with incorrect prepositional phrasing, passive voice, dangling participles, and missing commas (or too many), students today lack skills they need to present themselves as educated, intellectual members which their GPAs should reflect. These are ideas Michael Skube puts forward and for which Todd Hagstette gives some reasoning.
Everyday, I read signs that are missing apostrophes and it bothers me to no end. I have experience in editing, as I was the copy editor for my high school’s newspaper. During my time at this post, I began to notice patterns in the mistakes that I found: there/their/they’re and its/it’s mistakes, continuous misspellings of the word ‘definitely’, run-on sentences, and many other errors that any fourth grade teacher would call common. I soon realized that the majority of the student body must have stopped learning English around the seventh grade. For these reasons, I agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Skube when he claims that, “many students are hard-pressed to string together coherent sentences”.

Mr. Hagstette criticizes the way students read text and provides solutions to correct their dismal reading habits. What he says is that students need to learn how to read ‘aggressively’, which means taking class texts very seriously. He explains that the mind must be prepared mentally and the reader’s surroundings as well. I think he is correct when he says that students need to be out of their comfort zone. Too many times when I ask a fellow student how their assigned reading went, they respond saying, “I fell asleep.” Sometimes digging in to a book while in a quiet library is exactly what one would need to grasp the concepts truly; getting out of that comfort zone and into an ‘awkwardly silent’ situation. Students need to get lost in a book, not in a daydream.

So, overall, I agree with what both of these writers claim; that students need to learn first how to read, then how to write. Without a good basis in reading, writing would be like trying to fly a Boeing 747 sans flight school. Sure, after a while an observer could conceivably learn how to fly it. But would anyone really trust them to command a flight with five hundred passengers? It’s the almost the same with writers, some people simply lack the necessary background to be writing long essays or theses. I believe these two passages were very important, as some students may not have even been aware that they could be passive readers and not fulfilling their duties as scholars in using what they have learned since grade school everyday.