Entering the Conversation
Think about an activity that you do particularly well: cooking, playing
the piano, shooting a basketball, even something as basic as driving a
car. If you reflect on this activity, you’ll realize that once
you mastered it you no longer had to give much conscious thought to the
various moves that go into doing it. Performing this activity, in other
words, depends on your having learned a series of complicated
moves—moves that may seem mysterious or difficult to those who
haven’t yet learned them.
The same applies to writing. Often without consciously realizing it,
accomplished writers routinely rely on a stock of established moves
that are crucial for communicating sophisticated ideas. What makes
writers masters of their trade is not only their ability to express
interesting thoughts, but their mastery of an inventory of basic moves
that they probably picked up by reading a wide range of other
accomplished writers. Less experienced writers, by contrast, are often
unfamiliar with these basic moves, and unsure how to make them in their
own writ- ing. This book is intended as a short, user-friendly guide to
the moves that matter in academic writing.
One of our key premises is that these basic moves are so common that
they can be represented in templates: fill-in-the-blank grids that you
can use right away to structure your own writing. Perhaps the most
distinctive feature of this book is its presentation of over 100 such
templates, designed to help you successfully enter not only the world
of academic thinking and writing, but also the wider worlds of civic
discourse and work.
Rather than focus solely on abstract principles of writing, then, this
book offers model templates that help you to put those principles
directly into practice. Working with these templates can give you an
immediate sense of how to engage in the kinds of critical thinking you
are required to do at the college level and in the vocational and
public spheres beyond.
Some of these templates represent simple but crucial moves like those used to summarize some widely held belief.
Many Americans tend to assume that _______.
Others are more complicated.
On the one hand, _______. On the other hand, _______.
Author X contradicts herself. At the same time as she argues _______, she also implies _______.
You may object that _______.
This is not to say that _______.
It is true, of course, that critical thinking and writing go deeper
than any set of linguistic formulas, requiring that you question
assumptions, develop strong claims, offer supporting reasons and
evidence, consider opposing arguments, and so on. But these deeper
habits of thought cannot be put into practice unless you have a
language for expressing (and structuring) them in clear, organized
ways.
Starting Your Own Ideas as a Response to Others
The single most important template that we focus on in this book is the
“they say , I say ” formula that gives our book its title.
If there is any one point that we hope you will take away from this
book, it is the importance not only of expressing your ideas (“I
say”), but of presenting those ideas as a response to some other
person or group(“they say”). For us, the underlying
structure of effective academic writing—and of responsible public
discourse—resides not just in stating our own ideas, but in
listening closely to others around us, summarizing their views in a way
that they will recognize, and responding with our own ideas in kind.
Broadly speaking, academic writing is argumentative writing, and we
believe that to argue well you need to do more than assert your own
ideas. You need to enter a conversation, using what others say (or
might say) as a launching pad or sounding board for your own ideas. For
this reason, one of the main pieces of advice in this book is to
“write the voices of others into your text.”
In our view, then, the best academic writing has one underlying
feature: it is deeply engaged in some way with other peoples’
views. Too often, however, academic writing is taught as a process of
saying “true” or “smart” things in a vacuum, as
if it were possible to argue effectively without being in conversation
withsomeone else. If you have been taught to write a traditional
five-paragraph essay, for example, you have learned how to develop a
thesis and support it with evidence. This is good advice as far as it
goes, but it leaves out the important fact that in the real world we
don’t make arguments without being provoked. We make arguments
because someone has said or done something (or perhaps notsaid or done
something) and we need to respond: “I can’t see why you
like the Lakers so much”; “I agree: it was a great
film”; “How could you not love that adorable puppy?”
If it weren’t for other people and our need to challenge, agree
with, or otherwise respond to them, there would be no reason to argue
at all.
To make an impact as a writer, you need to do more than make statements
that are logical, well supported, and consistent. You must also find a
way of entering a conversation with others’ views—with
something “they say.” In fact, if your own argument
doesn’t identify the “they say” that you’re
responding to, then it probably won’t make sense. As Figure 1
suggests, whatyou are saying may be clear to your audience, but whyyou
are saying it won’t. For it is what others are saying and
thinking that motivates our writing and gives it a reason for being. It
follows, then, as Figure 2 suggests, that your own argument—the
“I say” moment of your text—should always be a
response to the arguments of others.
Many writers make explicit “they say/I say” moves in their
writing. One famous example is Martin Luther King Jr’s
“Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which consists almost
entirely of King’s eloquent responses to a public statement by
eight clergymen deploring the civil rights protests he was leading. The
letter—which was written in 1963, while King was in prison for
leading a demonstration in Birmingham—is structured almost
entirely around a framework of summary and response, in which King
summarizes and then answers their criticisms. In one typical passage,
King writes as follows.
You deplore the
demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am
sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions
that brought about the demonstrations.
—Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
King goes on to agree with his critics that “It is unfortunate
that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham,” yet he
hastens to add that “it is even more unfortunate that the
city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no
alternative.” King’s letter is so thoroughly
conversational, in fact, that it could be rewritten in the form of a
dialogue or play.
King’s critics:
King’s response:
Critics:
Response:
Clearly, King would not have written his famous letter were it not for
his critics, whose views he treats not as objections to his already
formed arguments, but as the motivating source of those arguments,
their central reason for being. He not only quotes what his critics
have said (“Some have asked: ‘why didn’t you give the
new city administration time to act?’”), but things they
might have said (“One may well ask: ‘How can you advocate
breaking some laws and obeying others?’”)—all to set
up what he himself wants to say.
A similar “they say/I say” exchange opens an essay about
American patriotism by the social critic Katha Pollitt, who uses her
own daughter’s comment to represent the national fervor of
post-9/11 patriotism that Pollitt goes on to oppose.
My daughter, who goes
to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the former World Trade
Center, says we should fly the American flag out our window. Definitely
not, I say. The flag stands for jingoism, vengeance, and war.
—Katha Pollitt, “Put Out No Flags”
As Pollitt’s example shows, the “they” you respond to
in crafting an argument need not be a famous author, or even some- one
known to your audience. It can be a family member like Pollitt’s
daughter, or a friend or classmate who has made a provocative claim. It
can even be something an individual or group might say—or a side
of yourself, something you once believed but no longer do, or something
you partly believe but also doubt. The important thing is that the
“they” (or “you” or “she”)
represent some wider group—in Pollitt’s case, those who
patriotically believe in flying the flag.
While King and Pollitt both identify the views they are responding to,
in some cases those views, rather than being explicitly named, are left
to the reader to infer. See, for instance, if you can identify the
implied or unnamed “they say” that the following claim is
responding to.
I like to think I
have a certain advantage as a teacher of literature because when I was
growing up I disliked and feared books.
Gerald Graff, “Disliking Books at an Early Age”
In case you haven’t figured it out already, the phantom
“they say” here is anyone who thinks that to be a good
teacher of literature, one must have grown up liking and enjoying
books.
As you can see from these examples, many writers use the “they
say/I say” format to disagree with others, to challenge standard
ways of thinking, and thus to stir up controversy. This point may come
as a shock to you, if you have always had the impression that in order
to succeed academically you need to play it safe and avoid controversy
in your writing, making statements that nobody can possibly disagree
with. Though this view of writing may appear logical, it is actually a
recipe for flat, lifeless writing, and for writing that fails to answer
what we call the “So what?” and “Who cares?”
questions. “William Shakespeare wrote many famous plays and
sonnets” may be a perfectly true statement, but precisely because
nobody is likely to disagree with it, it goes without saying and thus
would seem pointless if said.
Ways of Responding
Just because much argumentative writing is driven by disagreement, it
does not follow that agreement is ruled out. Although argumentation is
often associated with conflict and opposition, the type of
conversational, “they say/I say” argu- ment that we focus
on in this book can be just as useful when you agree as when you
disagree.
She argues _______, and I agree because _______.
Her argument that is supported by new research showing that _______.
Nor do you always have to choose between either simply agreeing
ordisagreeing, since the “they say/I say” format also works
to both agree and disagree at the same time.
He claims that
_______, and I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I agree
that _______. On the other hand, I still insist that _______.
This last option—agreeing and disagreeing simultaneously—is
one we especially recommend, since it allows you to avoid a simple yes
or no response and present a more complicated argument, while
containing the complication within a clear “on the one hand/on
the other hand” framework.
While the templates we offer in this book can be used to structure your
writing at the sentence level, they can also be expanded as needed to
almost any length, as the following elaborated “they say/I
say” template demonstrates.
In recent discussions
of _______, a controversial issue has been whether _______. On the one
hand, some argue that _______. According to this view, _______. On the
other hand, however, others argue that _______. In the words of one of
this view’s main proponents, “ _______.” According to
this view, _______. In sum, then, the issue is whether or _______.
My own view is that _______. Though I concede that _______, I still
maintain that _______. For example, _______. Although it might be
objected that _______, I reply that _______. The issue is important
because _______.
If you go back over this template, you will see that it helps you make
a host of challenging moves (each of which is taken up in forthcoming
chapters in this book). First, the template helps you open your text by
identifying an issue in some ongoing con- versation or debate
(“In recent discussions of , a con- troversial issue has
been”), then to map some of the voices in this controversy (by
using the “On the one hand/On the other hand” structure).
The template also helps you to introduce a quotation (“In the
words of”), to explain the quotation in your own words
(“According to this view”), and—in a new
paragraph—to state your own argument (“My own view is
that”), to qualify your argument (“Though I concede
that”), and then to support your argument with evidence
(“For example”). In addition, the template helps you make
one of the most crucial moves in argumentative writing, what we call
“planting a naysayer in your text,” in which you summarize
and then answer a likely objection to your own central claim
(“Although it might be objected that _______, I reply
_______”). Finally, this template helps you shift between
general, overarching claims (“In sum, them,”) and
smaller-scale, supporting claims (“For example”).
Again, none of us is born knowing these moves. Hence the need for this book.
Do Templates Stifle Creativity?
If you are like some of our students, your initial response to
templates may be distaste. At first, many of our students com- plain
that using templates will take away their originality and creativity
and make them all sound the same. “They’ll turn us into
writing robots,” one of our students insisted. Another agreed,
adding, “Hey, I’m a jazz musician. And we don’t play
by set forms. We create our own.” “I’m in college
now,” another student asserted; “this is third-grade level
stuff.”
In our view, however, the templates in this book, far from being
“third-grade level stuff,” represent the stock in trade of
sophisticated thinking and writing, and they often require a great deal
of practice and instruction to use successfully. As for the belief that
pre-established forms undermine creativity, we think it rests on a very
limited vision of what creativity is all about. In our view, the above
template and the others in this book will actually help your writing
become moreoriginal and creative, not less. After all, even the most
creative forms of expression depend on established patterns and
structures. Most song writers, for instance, rely on a time-honored
verse-chorus-verse pattern, and few people would call Shakespeare
uncreative because he didn’t invent the sonnet or dramatic forms
that he used to such dazzling effect. Even the most avant garde,
cutting-edge artists (like improvisational jazz musicians) need to
master the basic forms that their work improvises on, departs from, and
goes beyond, or else their work will come across as uneducated
child’s play. Ultimately, then, creativity and originality lie
not in the avoidance of established forms, but in the imaginative use
of them.
Furthermore, these templates do not dictate the content of what you
say, which can be as original as you can make it, but only suggest a
way of formatting howyou say it. In addition, once you begin to feel
comfortable with the templates in this book, you will be able to
improvise creatively on them and invent new ones to fit new situations
and purposes. In other words, the templates offered here are learning
tools to get you started, not structures set in stone. Once you get
used to using them, you can even dispense with them altogether, for the
rhetorical moves they model will be at your fingertips in an
unconscious, instinctive way.
]But if you still need proof that writing templates do not stifle
creativity, consider the following opening to an essay on the fast food
industry that we’ve included at the back of this book.
If ever there were a
newspaper headline custom-made for Jay Leno’s monologue, this was
it. Kids taking on McDonald’s this week, suing the company for
making them fat. Isn’t that like middle-aged men suing Porsche
for making them get speeding tickets? Whatever hap- pened to personal
responsibility? I happen to sympathize with these portly fast-food
patrons though, perhaps because I used to be one of them.
—David Zinczenko, “Don’t Blame the Eater”
Although Zinczenko relies on a version of the “they say/I
say” formula, his writing is anything but dry, robotic, or
uncreative. While Zinczenko does not explicitly use the words
“they say” and “I say,” the template still
gives the passage its underlying structure: “They saythat kids
suing fast-food companies for mak- ing them fat is a joke; but I
saysuch lawsuits are justified.”
Putting in Your Oar
Though the immediate goal of this book is to help you become a better
writer, at a deeper level it invites you to become a certain type of
person: a critical, intellectual thinker who, instead of sitting
passively on the sidelines, can participate in the debates and
conversations of your world in an active and empowered way. Ultimately,
this book invites you to become a critical thinker who can enter the
types of conversations described eloquently by the philosopher Kenneth
Burke in the following widely cited passage. Likening the world of
intellectual exchange to a never-ending conversation at a party, Burke
writes:
You come late. When
you arrive, others have long preceded you and they are engaged in a
heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell
you exactly what it is about. . . . You listen for a while until you
decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in
your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your
defense; another aligns him- self against you. . . . The hour grows
late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still
vigorously in progress. —Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of
Literary Form
What we like about this passage is its suggestion that stating on
argument and “putting in your oar” can only be done in
conversation with others; that we all enter the dynamic world of ideas
not as isolated individuals, but as social beings deeply connected to
others who have a stake in what we say.
This ability to enter complex, many-sided conversations has taken on a
special urgency in today’s diverse, post-9/11 world, where the
future for all of us may depend on our ability to put ourselves in the
shoes of those who think very differently from us. The central piece of
advice in this book—that we listen carefully to others, including
those who disagree with us, and then engage with them thoughtfully and
respectfully—can help us see beyond our own pet beliefs, which
may not be shared by everyone. The mere act of crafting a sentence that
begins “Of course, someone might object that ” may not look
like a way to change the world; but it does have the potential to jog
us out of our comfort zone, to get us thinking critically about our own
beliefs, and perhaps even to change our minds.
Exercises
1. Read the following paragraph from an essay by Emily Poe, a student
at Furman University. Focus your attention on the language Poe uses to
structure what she says (underlined here). If you look, you’ll
find that most writers make similar moves. Find a paragraph or two in
some other text that does so, underlining the words the writer uses to
structure what he or she says. Essays, newspaper editorials, and text-
books might be good places to look.
The term
“vegetarian” tends to be synonymous with “tree-
hugger” in many people’s minds. They see vegetarianism as a
cult that brainwashes its followers into eliminating an essential part
of their daily diets for an abstract goal of “animal
welfare.” However, few vegetarians choose their lifestyle just to
follow the crowd. On the contrary, many of these supposedly brainwashed
people are actually independent thinkers, concerned citizens, and
compassionate human beings. For the truth isthat there are many very
good reasons for giving up meat. Perhaps the best reasons are to
improve the environment, to encourage humane treatment of livestock, or
to increase one’s own health. In this essay, then, closely
examining a vegetarian diet as compared to a meat-eater’s diet
will show that vegetarianism is clearly the better option for
sustaining the Earth and all its inhabitants.
2. Write two paragraphs in which you first summarize our rationale for
the templates in this book and then articulate your own position in
response. If you want, you can use the
template below to organize your paragraphs, expanding and modifying it
as necessary to fit what you want to say. If you choose not to use the
template, explain why you believe your own writing method is
preferable.
In the Introduction to They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing,
Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein provide templates that _______.
Specifically, Graff and Birkenstein argue that the types of writing
templates they offer _______. As the authors themselves put it, “
_______.” Although some people believe _______, Graff and
Birkenstein insist that _______. In sum, then, their view is that
_______.
I agree/disagree/have mixed feelings. In my view, the types of
templates that the authors recommend _______. For instance, _______. In
addition, . Some might object, of course, on the grounds that_______.
Yet I would argue that_______. Overall, then, I believe_______—an
important point to make given_______.
Copyright © 2006 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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