Response to "Everybody Has Their Own Ideas"

I loved this article. I know I'm guilty of underlining cliches in my students' writing and then writing "cliche" above it, which isn't very helpful. This article helped me understand why. Students use cliches for all sorts of reasons, and to assume that they're just relying on familiar language to avoid insight and meaning isn't accurate (or at least isn't always accurate). In the future, when I see a cliche, I'll look beyond it to see what the student might be trying to say, and how I might help him/her say it differently, or more clearly.

Cliches bug me. I can't help it.

Great quote, which sums up the article for me: "I want to make clear that I do not think we should celebrate errors in pronoun agreement and cliches as if they were our students' most brilliant utterances. But I would like us to consider that the places in our students' essays that most annoy us because they seem so uncritical are also places where individual students (much like their teachers, as I will argue in the next section) are working hard to make sense of a world in which they are always both insiders and outsiders..."

One thing I found really interesting in this article was how students were using the conclusion to express their own opinions. Conclusions are funny little creatures, and it seems like no one really knows what to do with them. (Side Note: I was always taught that the conclusion should contain no new information, that one should only sum things up by reiterating their thesis and main points. After reading the chapter on introductions and conclusions in the Norton Field Guide, however, I realized that there are a number of effective ways to conclude a paper/essay. After reading Skorczewski's article, it's clear that conclusions baffle many of us).

Many freshman made A's in high school by writing essays full of cliches and commonalities. Analytical thinking still isn't particularly encouraged, so this is a big change for them.