They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing
They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing
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Gerald Graff on They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing
In their own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why they wrote it
The confusion that seemed unnecessaryGraff and Birkenstein came to this book through years of comparing notes on their shared freshman writing classroom at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and what stopped them was not the fact of student struggle but its apparent preventability. The pattern they kept noticing was consistent enough that they felt it could be named and handed directly to students.
To us, this confusion seemed largely unnecessary since, in our view, academic writing follows a rather conventional, elemental pattern that students could readily learn.
Before the book existed, Graff had already named the missing ingredient in his earlier work ‘Clueless in Academe’: he called it ‘Arguespeak,’ the idiomatic vocabulary that practiced writers absorb without being taught. The question was why students weren’t absorbing it the same way, and the answer Graff and Birkenstein landed on came down to reading habits.
Because most students don’t read widely or aspire to be a George Orwell or a Susan Sontag, few have internalized this language’s patterns and conventions.
Once they could describe the problem, the book’s animating ambition became compression: not a richer syllabus, but a shorter, clearer claim about what academic writing actually requires. Their description of the goal doubles as a description of the book’s entire structure.
Our mission, as we saw it, would be to cut through the clutter of complicated writing advice that was overwhelming our students and say, in effect, ‘Look, we know academic writing is hard and requires a lot of work, but much of the misery and confusion will lift if you do a couple of simple things: start by summarizing something someone else has said, often in your assigned reading, and then play off that summary to say what you think.’
How they wrote it
Templates born from classroom questionsThe conceptual spine of the book came from reducing all of academic writing to one repeatable move. Graff and Birkenstein had seen students produce elaborate arguments that still felt inert, and they traced the problem to a single missing step: the conversation that should precede and motivate any claim.
Despite its many moving parts, academic writing has one big constant: the move of entering a conversation, which is usually done by summarizing what other people have said or are saying about your subject and then using that summary to launch your own view, whether to agree, disagree, or some combination of both.
To pull students into dialogical thinking in the classroom, Graff and Birkenstein developed a set of diagnostic questions they asked during drafting and revision. These were not prompts for reflection; they were pressure tests designed to expose the monological habits that the five-paragraph essay, the dominant model in American secondary schooling, had trained students to rely on.
You’ve identified another key goal of ours: to get writers to move from monological, one-voiced models of writing like the five paragraph theme to a multi-voiced model, where they engage with alternate and especially opposing perspectives in ways that force them outside their comfort zones.
The templates themselves, sentence frames such as ‘Although it is often said , I argue ,’ were Birkenstein’s contribution: the interview’s author bio credits her specifically with developing them. Their justification rested on an observation about what students were already doing outside the classroom, which made the frames feel like translation rather than instruction.
Even though the counter-claims students address in their academic writing often propel them into new and unexpected territory, the conversational patterns themselves of listening, summarizing, and responding to such counter-claims are ones they’ve been using their entire lives in everyday conversations about such familiar topics as popular culture and sports.
The templates, in this framing, were not a scaffold to be removed once a student advanced. They were a formal recognition that the underlying skill already existed, and that academic writing had simply failed to say so.
What they want us to sit with
Colleges that left K-12 in the darkThe book’s argument about student confusion does not stop at the classroom door. Graff and Birkenstein’s larger claim is systemic: the inconsistency students encounter as they move from course to course is not a side effect of bad teaching but a structural feature of an educational system with no shared model of what writing is for.
Throughout the American educational system, students can’t assume that what they learn from one teacher will be honored — or even known about — by the next.
Assigning blame to schools had been the standard move in debates about college readiness long before this book appeared. Graff and Birkenstein redirected the charge. They argued that the institutions responsible for training those school teachers had never given them a clear target to teach toward, which meant the problem was being diagnosed at the wrong level.
The schools, for far too long, have unfortunately been singled out for blame for their students not being prepared for college. But we think that the colleges are centrally to blame since, as the training-ground for K-12 educators and test-makers, the colleges have left the entire K-12 sector in the dark about what ‘college readiness’ involves.
Individual students working through the templates in a single writing course can only carry the book’s lesson so far. Graff and Birkenstein were explicit that the fix they had in mind operated at the scale of institutional culture, not individual effort.
Our remedy? To convince a critical mass of faculty across the American curriculum to adopt a dialogical, argumentative model.
That word ‘dialogical’ carries the book’s full weight. The templates are a technology; the dialogical model is the argument. Graff and Birkenstein wanted faculty, not just students, to change their minds about what a piece of writing is supposed to be doing.