Gloss of Stanley Fish’s Writing (from where we left off in class):

P4: He did the same experiment multiple times with different classes at different universities and it always turned out the same way. So there must be something to the fact that you can make a poem out of almost anything.

P5: Fish asserts that if you pursue finding meaning in any writing with dedication then a meaning will appear simply because of how hard you are looking at the writing.

p6: We have been trained to recognize certain things in poems and you can find some of these things in almost any writing if you try hard enough.

p7: When we read something that intently then we are actually the one’s who give it its meaning.

p8: Fish basically explains in this paragraph that you see whatever you were taught to see, if you were taught to recognize lists then you might see it as a list, if you were taught to see it as a poem you will see the poem.

p9: He concludes that all interpretations are made not found, again pretty much what he said before about us giving it our own meaning.

p10: Students have conventional notions to start breaking down and analyzing things from the beginning which you see is demonstrated with his poem of names.

p11: Fish claims that it doesn’t just have to be writing, that it could be any object viewed in an institution. Basically if someone tells you there is meaning behind something you can look into that something until you find a meaning yourself. It may or may not be the same meaning as the other person but either way there will still be a meaning.

p12: Therefore the meaning behind anything is subjective because everybody sees their own thing, what they want to see.

p13: Now Fish claims that not only do readers create meaning but that meaning creates readers.

p14: The most important part about writing is how it is viewed by the reader and whether or not they will try to ascribe meaning to it.

In my first writing about what makes writing good, I pretty much just summarized everything that I’ve been taught. You know, correct grammar, easy to read, interesting. That may all be true, but now after reading Fish’s essay I see that there is more to it. There has to be a meaning behind the writing that the reader can look into and find. If a reader can find meaning out of five names listed on the board then certainly any real writing you do should be able to incorporate meaning within it. It might be easy to have meaning but its also important. Fish says in his essay that perhaps the readers don’t create the meaning but that the meaning creates the reader. That to me means that writing should have something behind it in order to get people to really read it and appreciate it. They should read whatever you have to say and when they are done with it they should still be contemplating what they read. You have to make the reader want to go back through so they can make sure they didn’t miss any of the meaning. That is the real hard part. Giving writing a little meaning is easy, but giving it enough meaning that the reader really cares to analyze it after they finish reading it, that’s another story. Doing this is how you make great writing though.