Stanley Fish spent the ’90s at Duke as one of the most famous—and vocal—English professors in the world. One uncontroversial fact about Fish is that this experience allows him to comment ably on universities from his perch as a semi-retired columnist for The New York Times. Entertainingly enough, a good many of the anecdotes Fish deploys when writing about higher education are either admittedly about his time at Duke or almost certainly referring to our dear University. In his latest column, Fish discusses a certain school’s “composition program.” The program had, at the time, 104 class sections per semester, sections which covered “everything under the sun” and were taught by graduate students. If Professor Fish wasn’t actually talking about Duke’s Writing 20 program, he might as well have been. Fish investigated the unnamed school’s writing program because his graduate students who were teaching the courses, “couldn’t write a clean English sentence. They could manage for about six words.” We’ll leave aside the fact that Fish’s jab probably reminds most of us of the author of the last Xeroxed handout we were told to study carefully. What matters is that Fish reached a heady conclusion very quickly: After reviewing a number of lesson plans, Fish “came to the conclusion that unless writing courses focus exclusively on writing, they are a sham, and [he] advised to insist that all courses listed as courses in composition teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else.” Nothing else. Sorry, students of Writing 20’s “Listening to the Wire,” not even Omar makes the cut. In the abstract, the idea that writing courses should teach “grammar and rhetoric and nothing else” sounds reasonable enough. We students would be handed an invaluable, easy-to-digest nugget from on high. It’s not clear where exactly we’d get it from—a manual or manual-like curriculum, I’m sure. Like everyone else, I could be a better writer than I am. There’s no good reason that my oh-so expensive university education shouldn’t help me farther along that path. Too bad Fish seems to think that such a well-delineated, composition booklet-strewn “path” to becoming a better writer actually exists. I’ll concede that freshman composition classes don’t exist to create literary geniuses. Happily, “genius-level” writing, or whatever you want to call it, has nothing to do with what we’re talking about. What Fish is talking about, what Duke’s Writing 20 program sets out to do and what we could all use a dose of is the process of learning to write capably and interestingly. To that end, I’ll take a page from poet Richard Hugo, shrug and offer that the best way to learn to write has little to do with either composition booklets or the specific esotericism of a Writing 20 class exclusively on ticks. Hugo happened to be talking about learning to write poetry, but neither Fish nor anyone in Duke’s writing program argues with his fundamental precept: The best way to learn to write is to write. Hugo makes this declaration in his book of lectures on writing poetry, “The Triggering Town,” a book that is well known for the demystifying and reassuring earthiness with which it approaches the writing of poetry. The working class poet asserted that writing was a better way to learn to write than reading alone. To the extent that Writing 20 actually assigns papers, it gets students writing, which may not make them into young Stanley Fishes (who often needs someone to W20 some brevity into him), but does make strides in teaching a complex subject in one short semester. I admit to having hated Writing 20 at the time—apologies to my wonderful instructor. It was a matter of practicality; I have taken and will take a dozen more writing-intensive courses. But my personal problems with the program have nothing to do with the inherent conceit in Fish’s assertion: The idea that someone (probably Fish) has written a universally suitable book about rhetoric and composition, a semester’s study of which will make up for a poverty of writing ability and do so infinitely better than a justifiably entertaining freshman composition course on a great HBO series. All due respect to Strunkt and White, but a writing manual doth not a writer make. Let me watch “The Wire,” compose a few essays and, if I’m really serious about getting better, keep writing.

Connor Southard is a Trinity sophomore. His column runs every Monday.