Using They Say/I Say

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The most recent Composition Conversation focused on using They Say/I Say in writing classes. Now in its second edition, They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, is one of the texts recommended by the CSULA Composition Committee for ENGL 101 and ENGL 102.

Graff and Birkenstein use Kenneth Burke’s famous metaphor of the “unending conversation” to illustrate the importance of convention in academic discourse. According to the authors of They Say/I Say, students have difficulty joining the academic conversation because they lack the language to make the expected argumentative and rhetorical moves. These moves are so common that the language used to express them has become stock language in academic discourse and can literally and productively be represented as fill-in the blank templates. Their book provides over a hundred such templates covering everything from introducing a quote (“According to X, ‘__’ ”) to explaining the consequences of one’s ideas (“These conclusions will have significant applications in __ as well as in __”). Participants generally praised the utility of They Say/I Say and offered some suggestions for using the text in a composition class. Concerns, though, were also raised about the use of such “crutches.” After all, the five-paragraph essay began as a temporary expedient to help students get started.

Some instructors using They Say/I Say assign group presentations on each chapter. One instructor allows students to design their presentation in whatever form they prefer. “Teach the way you would like to be taught,” was the advice given to students preparing their presentations. Another instructor requires groups to summarize the chapter, give examples of the templates from their own writing (or from their reading), and if they are unable to find examples to work with the class to develop examples of the templates in action. One instructor noted that during election season students found many examples of the templates in the public discourse surrounding political campaigns. Finally, to follow-up on the chapter(s) presented, one instructor included questions on subsequent peer reviews that required reviewers to identify templates in the writing of classmates.

Two primary concerns, however, were raised about They Say/I Say. First, one participant liked the quasi-meta-rhetorical quality of the text. In making explicit common rhetorical moves, the authors had “succeeded” in reducing rhetoric to a series of formal gestures. The result, however, is a rhetoric text that rarely appeals to rhetoric. Curiously the authors don’t always refer to the rhetorical purpose of a rhetorical move, or do so only implicitly. The absence (or implicitness) of rhetoric in They Say/I Say could result in the second concern: that students would take these templates as not temporary aids to future development but as the endpoint of development. Instead of mastering rhetoric students might believe they only need to master the templates. And without the rhetorical training needed to understand how the templates work and to recognize the historic and cultural contingency of these particular templates, how could a student ever progress beyond the mere repetition of these mechanical forms? As is often the case, the answer is education. The templates in They Say/I Say might free us of the mechanical details of rhetorical moves but not of the need to teach why some moves are more effective and appropriate than others.

From the “Introduction” to They Say/I Say

Burke writes:

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. --Kenneth Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form

What we like about this passage is its suggestion that stating on argument and “putting in your oar” can only be done in conversation with others; that we all enter the dynamic world of ideas not as isolated individuals, but as social beings deeply connected to others who have a stake in what we say.

Graff and Birkenstein, They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing

The Audience in the Text

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Who are my readers? As I sit here on a Sunday afternoon thinking about the concept of audience in a composition class, I am struck anew at both the centrality and the difficulty of this idea. Do I think of my readers as Plato and Aristotle seemed to think of the rhetor’s audience, as something to be mastered, susceptible listeners capable of persuasion provided I know how to persuade them? Or do I think of my readers as Blair or Campbell might have imagined them—intelligent, logical, rational, a bit skeptical but open to persuasion through effective argumentation? Or do I think of my readers as Walter Ong suggests I should, as a fiction, a mere construct of my mind created by me to serve my purposes?

Maybe I could figure out how to address my audience better if I knew more about them. Perhaps if I knew this audience that I am addressing I would better know what they wanted to read, what pleased them or displeased them, what persuaded them and what bored them. This approach focuses on the “real world,” where writing has clear and obvious purposes and where readers are specific and knowable. Not surprisingly, this idea of audience is popular in business and technical writing. The entrepreneur is encouraged to think of the banker who will read the business plan and decide on a loan. The engineer is encouraged to think of the accountant who will read the project proposal and decide on funding. Both the banker and the accountant are actual people and at least in theory knowable.

Or maybe I can never know my readers because they don’t exist until I invoke them. Maybe this “audience invoked” by my rhetorical choices is the only audience that exists. When the narrator in Middlemarch states, “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence” (italics added), we (the novel’s readers) long to be part of the we invoked by the narrator, a community of readers full of wisdom, generosity, and humanity. We become the readers Eliot’s narrator wants us to become, but we don’t exist until the narrator invokes us.

But what if I don’t see myself as part of the narrator’s we? Similarly, what if my readers reject my attempts to construct them? Certainly readers are both actual physical people about whom I could learn more and constructs brought into partial being by my choices as a writer. Readers are both active as in the “audience addressed” model and passive as in the “audience invoked” model.

It might be tempting to narrow our conception of audience to something manageable, and in fact as teachers we often do. Students can grasp the idea of readers—other people with other backgrounds, experiences, opinions, and ideas—because they are themselves readers struck at times by the foreignness of the texts we ask them to read. They know first-hand the experience of being not merely the “audience addressed” but the “audience unaddressed.” Their confusion as readers, though, makes real the duties and responsibilities faced by any writer (including student writers) whose primary purpose is to communicate.

In short, like all rhetoric it comes down to choices. To some degree a writer chooses his or her readers, fashions them, imagines them, invokes them. But equally important is whether the writer chooses to acknowledge his or her readers, accept them, speak to them, meet them where they are in order to advance them.

Some Common Ways of Thinking About Audience

Aristotle: “Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds. The first kind depends on the personal character of the speaker; the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind; the third on the proof, or apparent proof, provided by the words of the speech itself.” [This formulation of ethos, pathos and logos is seen as emphasizing speaker (ethos), audience (pathos), and speech art (logos).]

Walter Ong: “The historian, the scholar or scientist, and the simple letter writer all fictionalize their audiences, casting them in a made-up role and calling on them to play the role assigned.”

Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford: “The most complete understanding of audience thus involves a synthesis of the perspectives we have termed audience addressed, with its focus on the reader, and audience invoked, with its focus on the writer.”

Lester Faigley: “The social perspective . . . moves beyond the traditional rhetorical concern for audience, forcing researchers to consider issues such as social roles, group purposes, communal organization, ideology, and finally theories of culture.”

Recap of Composition Conversation: Responding to Student Writing (Oct 7, 2009)

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Last week a small (but select!) group of writing instructors met in the English Department Seminar room for the first “Composition Conversation.” The topic was responding to student writing and faculty discussed the type and timing of their responses to student writing and shared ideas about managing workload. The conversation revealed general agreement about the basic underlying principles (see below), but also a diversity of approaches used to achieve those ends.

The first distinction that emerged was between responses that attempted to help students revise and develop drafts and those concerned with assessment. This distinction has a long history in composition pedagogy, with the emphasis both in theory and practice on responding to early drafts to facilitate effective revision. Ideally, teachers read drafts and offer immediate feedback, which writers use to improve the effectiveness of their drafts. The reality, however, is complicated by a range of factors.

First, discussion participants noted the tendency to “slip into marking” grammar errors and other local issues and thereby lose track of the larger, global and rhetorical issues that were probably of greater importance (see below for a discussion of this problem). Second, participants called attention to the problem of class size. While it is possible (and advisable) to comment with some frequency on early and intermediate drafts in an ENGL 095 or ENGL 096 class of fifteen to nineteen students, instructors struggle to continue this practice in ENGL 101 or ENGL 102 with class sizes of 27 or 28. In these larger classes, the instructor’s response to student writing tends to come at the end of the process as a final assessment of the student’s work. As everyone acknowledged, it is unclear how effective these “final comments” are in helping students become better writers.

Instructors offered several strategies for making final comments effective. One instructor avoids handing back essays at the end of class and instead sets aside class time during which students are required to read through their commented-upon drafts and are encouraged to ask questions about the comments. Another instructor suggested that we could make more explicit our expectations (as teachers) that the comments on one essay be “carried forward” to the next writing assignment. A third instructor shared her strategy of using different color ink for different kinds of comments, a practice that helps students see the different ways in which readers respond to their texts.

Besides making sure that students read and understand our comments, participants also discussed strategies for easing the workload. First, instructors noted the importance of avoiding excessive marking, a time-consuming process that produces very limited results. Second, instructors reiterated the importance of peer review and peer responses as appropriate and effective interventions in the writing process. Third, some instructors shared their use of checklists and rubrics to simplify commenting and evaluation. Finally, some instructors discussed an in-class activity that trained students to become the “graders.” Both the use of rubrics and the use of peer groups to assess student writing are topics of their own and so will be treated in subsequent articles.

The next Composition Conversation will be on Tuesday, October 20 on the topic of “Conferencing.”

Basic Principles for Responding to Student Writing

1. Students benefit more from responses to “in-progress” writing than from responses to “finished” writing.
2. Students benefit more from responses that focus on form and content than from responses that focus on mechanics.
3. Instructor comments (ideally) should help students understand their weaknesses and strengths as writers.
4. “Marking” grammar, style and other mechanical problems should be limited to only a portion of the essay and carried out with the aim of moving students towards independence (i.e. helping students become better editors and proofreaders of their own work).
5. Instructors should be prepared to respond differently to student writing depending on the timing of the intervention. Early responses should be facilitative, helping students to discover their own solutions. Later responses might become more directive if students are unable to respond effectively to earlier guidance. Final responses can be evaluative, but should still focus on what the writer can do to improve the draft, even if there will be no opportunity to revise.