50 pages • 1 hour read
Gerald Graff, Cathy BirkensteinThey Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing
Nonfiction | Reference/Text Book | Adult | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Ideological Context: Academic Writing
Academic writing is a broad category comprised of numerous scholarly genres. It includes articles found in scholarly journals, books published by academic imprints, teaching resources, and virtually all written work produced by students. With the exception of student writing, pieces in this genre are usually created by career academics such as professors, scientists, and researchers, as well as by public intellectuals.
Aside from the vocational implications of the term, academic writing is also generically defined as discursive nonfiction. Academic writing concerns ideas, facts, and theories; across fields of study, academic writing is premised on presenting a thesis and defending it.
Different areas of scholarship tend to favor particular generic conventions. This extends to elements like formatting, organizational frameworks, and style (e.g., writing in the humanities tends to favor Modern Language Association [MLA] style; research in medicine and the social sciences favors American Psychological Association [APA] style; engineering papers are written in Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering [IEEE] style).
Scientific studies, for example, tend to be written in dry, heavily technical styles. Conversely, writing across the humanities tends to be less rigid; humanities writers often draw from literary craft and poetics when developing their voices. It is also much more common for humanities papers to use first-person perspective than scientific reports, which conventionally center data and results over authorial presence.a
Social Context: Introductory Writing Courses
They Say/I Say is an introduction to argumentative writing for new and inexperienced writers. As such, it is often used as a textbook in late high school and early undergraduate-level writing courses. It is especially common in freshman composition courses, which are required classes for undergraduate students in most American colleges.
First-year writing courses generally focus on the fundamentals of writing, especially in college settings. These courses traditionally tackle subjects like research methods, navigating the writing process, stylistic conventions (in terms of both creative craft and formatting), and basic argumentation. Some introductory composition classes may also deal with multiple genres of writing and multimedia integration. However, these classes are, at their core, designed to prepare entering students for college-level reading and writing across majors.
The strategies Graff and Birkenstein encourage are broadly applicable across various media, including text, speech, and video. At the same time, their advice is designed specifically for argumentative works in general: Research papers, literary analyses, lab reports, philosophical pieces, and many others.
Depending upon the breadth of a given class’s syllabus, They Say/I Say may be suitable as a core text that students return to each week. This would be especially true of a class that explicitly focuses on rhetoric and argumentation. Other introductory writing classes—particularly those that center other aspects of writing (or tackle writing in a broader sense)—might do better to use one or two chapters from They Say/I Say as supplemental readings.
