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.
Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “Tying It All Together”
Part 3, Chapter 8 Summary: “‘As a Result’: Connecting the Parts”
This chapter explains how to connect “all the parts” of a piece of writing, whether they are large-scale ideas or individual phrases. Graff and Birkenstein open by describing a student named Bill, who wrote short, choppy sentences such as “Spot is a good dog. He has fleas” (105). They go on to explain the effect (the “so what?”):
And yet Bill did focus well on his subjects. When he mentioned Spot the dog (or Plato, or any other topic) in one sentence, we could count on Spot (or Plato) being the topic of the following sentence as well. This was not the case with some of Bill’s classmates, who sometimes changed topic from sentence to sentence or even from clause to clause within a single sentence. But because Bill neglected to mark his connections, his writing was as frustrating to read as theirs. In all these cases, we had to struggle to figure out on our own how the sentences and paragraphs connected or failed to connect with one another (106).
The authors add that the problem of inadequately “tying things together” can be resolved by “gestur[ing] back” to prior ideas or ideas that are about to be mentioned.
Bill’s problem is that he does not make his sentences “fit in” with each other. To improve his writing, he should use transitions that both connect his sentences and provide more information, as in “Spot is a good dog, even though he has fleas,” or “Spot is a good dog, but he has fleas.”
Graff and Birkenstein note that transition words must be inserted carefully to ensure they make sense; the counterexample of, “Spot is a good dog because he has fleas” demonstrates a transition that doesn’t make sense. This chapter includes a transition word bank separated into subsections for different contexts (“addition,” “elaboration,” “example,” “cause and effect,” “comparison,” “contrast,” “concession,” and “conclusion”).
The authors tell us that “ideally, transitions should operate so unobtrusively in a piece of writing that they recede into the background and readers do not even notice that they are there” (111). They compare this unobtrusiveness to that of cars’ turn signals, which other drivers recognize automatically.
Graff and Birkenstein also explain “pointing words,” such as “this,” “those,” “that,” and simple pronouns: “These terms are like an invisible hand reaching out of your sentence, grabbing what’s needed in the previous sentences and pulling it along” (113). While these terms are useful, overusing them and underexplaining them can confuse the reader. Pointing words are most useful, the authors say, when they are qualified with a description.
Graff and Birkenstein encourage their readers to repeat themselves “with a difference.” Repetition should be “varied and interesting” and help to clarify meaning. For Graff and Birkenstein, well-constructed arguments include sentences that “echo” and “qualify” each other. For example, in the sentence, “Cheyenne loved basketball. Nevertheless, she feared her height would put her at a disadvantage” (117), “she” echoes “Cheyenne” (because they both have the same referent) and “love” qualifies “fear” to create a conflict.
Part 3, Chapter 9 Summary: “‘Ain’t So/Is Not’: Academic Writing Doesn’t Always Mean Setting Aside Your Own Voice”
Graff and Birkenstein acknowledge that many students are intimidated by academic writing. These students feel they have to abandon their natural way of communicating and write with “big words, long sentences, and complex sentence structures” (121). The authors argue that, while academic writers shouldn’t use their “everyday language practices” instead of being rigorous and precise in their language, they can (and maybe even should) use both.
Graff and Birkenstein refer to well-blended colloquial and scholarly language as “formal/informal mixings” of language. Throughout this chapter, they present and analyze examples of this practice from other writers across disciplines, such as food critic Eric Schlosser, literary critic Judith Fetterley, and language scholar Geneva Smitherman. According to Smitherman’s work, this practice of formal/informal mixing allows non-standard English speakers (such as native speakers of African American Vernacular English [AAVE]) to communicate in a way that feels natural to them.
While formal/informal mixing is more common in the humanities and journalism than in the sciences, Graff and Birkenstein encourage their readers to experiment with their language styles whenever possible. Whether this means “dressing down” language (making it less formal), “dressing up” language (making it more formal), or combining the two depends on the context. Whether or not a given context is appropriate for experimental language or formal language is ultimately a matter of the writer’s judgment.
Part 3, Chapter 10 Summary: “‘But Don’t Get Me Wrong’: The Art of Metacommentary”
Graff and Birkenstein define metacommentary as commentary about one’s own argument. For example, metacommentary could include qualifying a statement with, “What I meant to say was…” or “You’re probably not going to like what I’m about to say, but…” (129). While doing this may seem redundant, Graff and Birkenstein see it as necessary for clear communication, and recommend using metacommentary especially when dealing with complex or confusing topics:
[T]hink of your text as two texts joined at the hip: a main text in which you make your argument and another in which you ‘work’ your ideas, distinguishing your views from others they may be confused with, anticipating and answering objections, connecting one point to another, explaining why your claim might be controversial, and so forth (130).
Metacommentary is particularly useful for clarifying a writer’s intentions, but it can also help a writer develop their ideas and bulk up the length of their text. Graff and Birkenstein recommend using metacommentary to students struggling to meet their page minimum.
Even titles can be powerful sources of metacommentary. Many academic books and papers include a punchy phrase followed by a colon and a direct description of the text’s content. Graff and Birkenstein offer Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business as an example. They remind students to put thought into their titles, as a common mistake among new writers is to leave works vaguely titled (e.g., “English paper”) or leave them untitled altogether.
Graff and Birkenstein close this chapter by explaining that many of the rhetorical moves They Say/I Say has discussed up to this point qualify as metacommentary, including “entertaining objections, adding transitions, framing quotations, answering ‘so what?’ and ‘who cares?’” (134).
Part 3 Analysis
While Graff and Birkenstein present the reader with several instructive analogies and examples in every chapter of They Say/I Say, the chapters in Part 3 lean more heavily on these pedagogical devices to explicate the theoretical concepts they discuss.
Part 1 deals with fairly straightforward problems like framing summaries and integrating quotes, and Part 2 instructs the reader on presenting their own arguments in clear and compelling ways. These goals can be difficult to meet in practice, but the principles behind them are concrete and easy to map out. This is especially true of Part 1, as introducing a primary source or theoretical framework usually takes place in a particular section or two early on in a paper. These issues are a matter of laying out contextual groundwork.
The topics in Part 3, however, are applicable across sections and deal simultaneously with the broad strokes and specifics of style, organization, and argumentation. The analogies and examples that Graff and Birkenstein use—both here and in other sections of They Say/I Say—help to break down denser and more theoretical concepts for their inexperienced readers.
For example, they compare the strategic repetition of ideas in a piece of writing to the handholds used by rock climbers:
Repetition, in short, is the central means by which you can move from point A to point B in a text. […] Think of the way experienced rock climbers move up a steep slope. Instead of jumping or lurching from one handhold to the next, good climbers get a secure handhold on the position they have established before reaching for the next ledge. The same thing applies to writing. To move smoothly from point to point in your argument, you need to firmly ground what you say in what you’ve already said. In this way, your writing remains focused while simultaneously moving forward (118).
Graff and Birkenstein use analogies like this to illustrate the point of various rhetorical strategies (in this case, repetition) in ways that a direct description cannot. This analogy and others like it, such as the comparison between turn signals and transitions and pointing words in Chapter 8, take potentially challenging rhetorical ideas out of the theoretical space of the text and insert them into concrete and realistic situations. They function the same way that the authors’ extended comparison between argumentative writing and conversation does and have the same effect of Demystifying Academic Writing for Students and Laypeople.
Graff and Birkenstein also present real-life situations from their classrooms to illustrate their points, as in the example of “Bill’s” writing in the discussion of connecting sentences and ideas in Chapter 8. In the process, they return several times to Bill’s statements that “Spot is a good dog. He has fleas.” Their revisions of these two simple sentences, which use a variety of transitional words, clearly illustrate how those words affect the meaning of the sentences, while they also show in practice the value of the principle of repetition.
By frequently returning to the same two sentences by Bill, Graff and Birkenstein illustrate the usefulness of repetition as a “handhold.” The actual content of the sentences do not matter; they are only relevant insofar as they can exemplify the rhetorical concepts Graff and Birkenstein want to address. Returning to the same phrase over and over again also wastes less time introducing new, rhetorically irrelevant samples to the text.
