| My
hope was that They Say / I Say might just be the missing
link that I’ve been looking for. Graff and Birkenstein’s
“moves that matter” are concrete ways that students
can formulate their thinking and writing such that they can enter
into this conversation. For instance their formulae offer practical
suggestions as to how to recount the arguments of others and then
clearly indicate your own position. While the “moves”
that they outline are necessary features of what we recognize
as sophisticated academic prose, they are not merely formal conventions
applied at the end of the research process. If research is, in
Zora Neale Hurston’s pithy formulation, “formalized
curiosity” then the forms that Graff presents can actually
catalyze research; they can give curiosity a new and more profound
shape, which, in turn can deepen thought.
This fall
I gave my first-year students readings from Graff and Birkenstein’s
book and presented them with a worksheet of fill in the blank
sentences that, I hoped, would push them further in their engagement
with their research. These sentences, adapted from They Say
/ I Say, included:
- Many scholars
/critics who have discussed _____________ have focused on ___________.
But this is to ignore _________, which is important because
__________.
- Understanding
the history of _________ is important because _________.
- Most casual
observers probably think that ___________ is superficial and
of little real importance. This is a mistake because ___________.
- In a narrow
sense I am writing about ___________. More broadly, however,
I am interested in ___________.
When I first
shared these formulae with my students they looked at me as if
I was a bit crazy. But I pressed on, reassuring them that yes
these are awkward and clunky. The point is, precisely, to make
these your own, to adapt and camouflage, integrating them into
your own writing. Indeed, my students did find these forms useful
and I noticed that their papers were peppered with traces of these
phrases and rhetorical moves. In particular, I think that it helped
students think about how to position and articulate their argument;
how to distinguish between what they are saying and what their
sources are saying; and how, at key moments, to dilate the scope
and significance of their narrower topic.
What strikes me as admirable about this book is that it presents
rhetorical forms and templates that are not narrowly prescriptive
or merely formal exercises. Rather these templates are generative
of deeper thought and they force a more profound engagement with
one’s sources and one’s arguments. In this, they remind
me of the distinction that our former colleague Lawrence Stanley
made in his article “Structural-Generative
Reflections on a Term in PWR,” between rhetoric as static
and formal, on the one hand, and rhetoric as generative, on the
other hand. Stanley suggested that we can think of rhetoric in
formal terms as something that helps us name features of texts;
or we can think of rhetoric in dynamic and generative terms as
something that helps us shape our own ideas so they can take an
appropriate form.
Graff and
Birkenstein’s They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter
in Academic Writing can help beginning and advanced writers
discover forms that allow for more sophisticated writing and thinking
to take shape.
Now, please
return to the opening of the essay and fill out the templates
as you see fit.
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