Book Review: They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein
One of my favorite classes to teach is English Methods. Honestly. I love getting to know the majors and I really like teaching writing. It takes me back to graduate school in really good ways: watching students grow in their writing and growing through teaching them. I had fun teaching required courses in the Comparative Literature department and, during the summers, a course with the First Year/Transfer Students Program. Most of the students understood the import of learning writing as a technical skill. They pushed me to teach it as such.
As an eager dissertation writer, I had to rely on the fact that writing is a technical skill. Specifically, I had to come to terms with the fact that I did not possess as much skill in that area as I imagined. I struggled to make sense of my larger arguments. My close readings were more summary than analysis. My literature reviews were over-populated with block quotations and wordy ways of say “Yep; what she said.” After all, teaching students to write five to eight-page papers was one task. Writing my own twenty-page papers was a different task, but no less do-able. But, corralling a dissertation-length topic and argument was a different beast altogether.
In 2008, I purchased a copy of They Say/I Say. (I am not sure who to thank for the recommendation.) Graff & Birkenstein provide a useful set of synopses for how to engage as an academic writer. They proceed from the crucial premise that all writing is in conversation with other writing. Academic writing is no exception. They clarify the portions of various academic conversations in four main sections: “They Say,” “I Say,” “Tying it All Together,” and “In Specific Academic Contexts.” In these sections, the smaller chapters explain how a writer might enter a written conversation. They provide templates as well.
Graff & Birkenstein explain their use of templates in detail. It seems they’ve had some pushback. Some teachers are concerned about creativity in writing and the stifling of critical thinking. My experience has been that students’ creativity and my own, quite frankly, is unleashed when I have some ready-made language to get to a point. After all, we can certainly revise the language. The template does its job: speed up the normally slow chicken-egg cycle between ideas and words.
As a writer, I have used They Say/I Say to rescue me from various written conundrums. When I cannot get out of “they say” and my writing only rehearses older arguments, I turn to the “I Say” portion. When my argument lacks a degree of depth or history or “so what,” I turn to the “They Say” portion. Before I revise, I tend to go to the latter two sections — “Tying it All Together” and “In Specific Academic Contexts” — since a refresher provides clarity about what I wish to add to the conversation.
Thinking as an editor, I find the little book useful since it distills the main rhetorical moves of an argument. Often, academic writers have either a “they say” problem or an “I say” problem, sometimes both. Not only does They Say/I Say help me by clarifying a writer’s concern, it also gives me a few templates to offer a struggling writer. Bonus: if a writer decides they dislike the templates, they get the jist enough to create their own.
If you’re looking for a book about academic craft, this will certainly not disappoint!
