Typically when someone reads or looks at something with no knowledge about it or an unbiased viewpoint, they take it for what it is. For example, a person who sees a dog for the first time in their life, either as a child or an adult, might think, "So that's a dog? What a cute animal." However, getting into the biased area, a veterinarian would look at a dog differently than just the average person because they're trained to find health problems and prescribe medicine to heal them. Maybe the dog is constantly breathing heavier than normal, leading the vet to believe that it has lung/breathing issues. The important thing to note is that the vet looked at the dog through his own medical filter based off of his training whereas the average person just looks at the animal for what it is. This leads into Stanley Fish's essay "How to Recognize a Poem When You See One" because he compares the differences between two of his classes that have been trained in different ways.

In order to see how the two classes' views of the words on the blackboard differ, it is important to see that they are two different kinds of classes, with the only common ground being that they are both English classes. Fish's first class at 9:30 studied the style and language of a work to examine what it meant for the work, while his eleven o'clock class only studied 17th century religious poetry of England (Fish 8). While both English classes, the content is vastly different between the two, so that explains why the second class analyzed the names completely different than the first. To the first class, the names were just an assignment of some authors they had to read, so they took it for what it was: an assignment. However, to the second class, as soon as the professor falsely told them it was a religious poem, they immediately used the filter they had developed from that class to connect the names to the Bible and break down the whole poem from a religiously significant point of view. Even though it wasn't actually a religious poem, Fish wanted to see what would happen if he told his second class that it was, and what he probably suspected came true.

On pages nine and ten, Fish goes into great detail about his students' analysis of the "poem," and that is important because he shows just how large of an effect a certain type of training can have on your point of view. He then uses that to segway into his own explanation of why that happens and why it's important. In terms of close reading this work, having a personal personal anecdote is a major tool that authors can use to convey meaning to their audience, and it's important to recognize when close reading a work. On page ten, Fish says, "Some of you will have noticed that I have not yet said anything about Hayes...because of all the words in the poem it proved the most recalcitrant to interpretation." That sentence is key to the overall work and to the point that Fish is trying to make, but it is also very effective because a real life example helps to connect to the audience and convey the point better than just explaining it. This sentence is a big foreshadowing to what the main point of his paper is, and it's at that point that he moves away from the personal anecdote and into the explanation behind it.

The whole point that Fish is trying to make in this paper is that people will interpret things based on their own experiences and training, that there is no completely unbiased point of view, even if it isn't a positive or negative bias. Another important sentence to his point is as follows: "It is not that the presence of poetic qualities compels a certain kind of attention but that the paying of a certain kind of attention results in the emergence of poetic qualities" (Fish 11). While it may take multiple times to read and fully comprehend this statement, it's like a Eureka moment when the audience understands what he means by it. Basically, he puts the point he's trying to make into one nice little sentence. It's the fact that based on experience and training, someone can make something have almost any meaning they want it to. Continuing on page 11, Fish even goes further to call it a "recipe" because his class followed a set process. From the close reading lens, using an analogy is a good technique to help the audience understand the main point more easily. It seems as though Stanley Fish likes to use short yet precise sentences to help ingrain his point into his audience. For example, on page 12, Fish says, "interpretation is not the art of construing but the art of constructing" (Fish 12). Basically, he is saying that finding a meaning in something doesn't come from a particular interpretation, but rather by making a meaning even if it is not clear or does not even have a meaning at all.

By using personal anecdotes alongside analogies and precise sentences, Stanley Fish is able to clearly make his point to the audience that nothing has meaning by default, but rather assigned meaning somewhere in its history. This paper argues that everything in the world has been given a meaning at some point and that nothing really has actual meaning, so it's important for humans to make meanings out of things or else people will lead miserable lives. While there may be flaws in that logic, Fish makes valid points that people only know what things are and what they mean based on past institutional knowledge and that nothing has inherent meaning. Fish even goes so far as to say that "all objects are made and not found, and that they are made by the interpretive strategies that we set in motion...the means by which they are made are social and conventional" (Fish 14). Ultimately, Fish does a very good job at conveying his viewpoint to the audience even if the audience doesn't agree with him. He presents the information in a way that the average person can relate to rather than using overblown and sophisticated language that the average reader will blindly read without comprehending. Writing a paper on this subject, it's hard to write it in a way that makes the reader actually want to listen, but Fish's use of anecdotes, analogies, and short simple sentences helps to keep the reader engaged and hearing what he has to say.

