Why Wiley?

It’s quiet. Maybe a little too quiet. Four students are looking down in their laps and the rest are just staring off into space. One student is waiting awkwardly up front with her paper waiting for someone to say something. Finally someone speaks up and all they have to say is that they need to correct the formatting. There hasn’t been one comment that isn’t about structure or grammar. I understand the importance of it but the why aren’t the ideas being focused on? Maybe it’s the students lack of attention towards the actual writing or maybe it’s because they were taught that structure meant more than content.

I’ve been in classrooms where teachers drilled on the importance of having the perfect formatting and if the MLA was correct it was automatic fail. It was a bit extreme but it made me worry more about how it looked rather than what was being said. The hook sentence is important and thesis should only be one to two sentences. Every first sentence in a paragraph should make it clear on what the paragraph is about and should also include how it relates to your thesis. Let’s not forget that it has to be at least five paragraphs long with quotes for support. Two quotes minimum. NEVER EVER use the semicolon unless you know how to use it. Actually don’t ever use it. There’s so much to remember and the more classes I take the idea of structure becomes more important.

What makes things more difficult is that not every single teacher has a set mind on what the perfect formatted paper looks like. So one teacher might like the one thing and the other could hate it. The thought that most of my grade depends on how the paper looks is stressful. So I might understand why these students are so focused on the structure.

Not all my teachers have been this way though. The best teacher I ever had was in highschool. I was lucky to have him my freshman and junior year. He taught us how to almost write backwards. We would start with our ideas first. Just write what we had wanted to about a certain subject and slowly narrow it down from there. He taught us the importance of content over structure. He did teach us about structure but was never made the certain of attention. The idea of a five paragraph essay didn’t exist in his class.

So why is structure over content s thing? Isn’t the idea worth more? Wiley has this strange idea that there should be such a strict rule on writing. I could see how a template would be helpful but at the same time I want to reject it.