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Gerald
Graff and Cathy Birkenstein Graff’s pocket sized They
Say / I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing (Norton
2006) is an interesting book because it argues _________. Rather
than focusing on _______, Graff and Birkenstein stress ______.
In the end, their book helps students understand how academic
writing works because it ______, ________, and _________.
Graff and Birkenstein
take a fresh and productively reductive approach to explaining
how one turns the materials of research into exciting, dynamic,
and sophisticated prose. They set out to demystify academic writing
by distilling it to what we might think of as its rhetorical blueprints
and what they term “the moves that matter in academic writing.”
Graff and
Birkenstein present templates – almost Mad Libs –
that illustrate the key moves that scholars make when they write
research-based prose. Graff has argued elsewhere – in books
such as Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life
of the Mind (Yale 2003) and articles such as “Trickle-Down
Obfuscation,” (Education Week, XXII, no. 39 (June
4, 2003)) – that academia, particularly introductory writing
classes, tends to dumb down its topic. We assume, Graff argues,
that our beginning students will be unable to understand the argumentative
and rhetorical contours of a given field and thus present them
with artificial and overly simplified writing tasks rather than
asking them to do the sorts of thing we all do in our own prose.
They Say / I Say attempts to teach students how to recount
what other scholars have said; to summarize; to quote; to respond
to sources in various ways; and to utilize metacommentary (“My
main point is ________.”).
While their examples
of fill in the blank templates for students to complete might
seem comically simple, they are part of what strikes me as an
intellectually engaging, thoughtful, and eminently practical way
to teach our students how to write sophisticated research-based
arguments. Many writing instructors, myself included, use Kenneth
Burke’s notion of the rhetorical situation as a way of helping
our students imagine the nature and challenges of college-level
research. Burke suggests that any rhetorical situation that we
find ourselves in is like a never-ending conversation. When we
arrive, the conversation is already well under way; and it will
continue long after we leave. Participating in this conversation
involves listening and acquainting yourself with the various speakers
and then, at some point, according to Burke, you are ready to
“put in your oar.”
Maybe it’s
the stuffy uncoolness of the way in which Burke describes being
an insider as getting to sit in a parlor and talk or maybe it’s
that it’s really hard to know how, as a novice, you can
manage to enter this conversation – but regardless, my students
have never really latched onto this conceit. And I myself, have
always been dissatisfied when I’ve used the Burkean parlor
as a way to describe research as a conversation. I feel that I
haven’t been able to offer sufficiently practical ways to
enter the “conversation” and my advice has often sounded
a bit mystical: read, think, and you’ll know when you’re
ready to put your oar in.
(continued...)
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