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

Low and High Stakes Writing

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In our professional lives all of us engage in a variety of writing tasks, each with its own purpose, intended audience, and associated conventions, and increasingly instructors are attempting to create a similar variety of writing tasks in their classrooms. Besides providing students with a variety of writing tasks, instructors also hope to encourage more writing by students without increasing the already heavy "paper-load" instructors face. Everybody agrees that students should do more writing, that more writing will lead to better writing, and that writing is essential to learning. But how do already overburdened instructors balance the legitimate pedagogic need for more writing by students with the equally legitimate claim of too much student work and not enough time to respond to it?

An important distinction that has emerged in response to this problem is that between "low-stakes" and "high-stakes" writing. Most instructors are already familiar with high-stakes writing, because they already require it of students. High-stakes writing is usually formal, structured writing that is assigned a grade. The writing might be take-home or timed, and the grade is usually a significant part of the course grade. In general, high-stakes writing is supposed to:\

• demonstrate what students have learned
• follow the conventions of formal academic prose (as well as discipline specific conventions)
• be relatively error free (when written outside of class)

High-stakes writing assignments are stressful for students and involve considerable work for the instructor.

Low-stakes writing falls under the general category of "writing to learn" pedagogy and is often used in writing classes as invention strategies. Low-stakes writing is also often used to assess quickly how well students understand course material. The writing is usually

• short and informal
• impromptu (in-class) or take-home
• intended to stimulate thought, and keep students engaged and thinking during class
• never corrected or graded

While the instructor might read low-stakes writing, the instructor should avoid lengthy comments, corrections, or even assigning a grade. Instead of a grade, most instructors use a simple acceptable or not-acceptable system (i.e. credit or no credit, check or minus) or simply "handed-in" or "not handed-in." If the instructor chooses to provide a comment, it will usually be directed to the content of the writing and not the form. For example, an instructor might need to signal in a comment a problem, such as a student not responding to a journal topic, inappropriately paraphrasing in a summary assignment, or otherwise misunderstanding the writing assignment. In general, comments, if used at all, should be brief.

Listed below are some examples of low-stakes writing assignments:

Journals
Freewriting or Quickwrites
Mini essays
Role-playing writing
E-writing

Low-stakes writing can also serve as pre-writing for high-stakes writing assignments. In-class brainstorming activities might lead to brief paper proposals which might lead to a formal paper. In short, low-stakes writing is not a substitute for high-stakes writing, but research seems to indicate that it improves student performance on high-stakes writing assignments.

Some Examples of
Low-Stakes Writing

Journals: Probably the most common low-stakes writing found in composition classes, journal entries might be guided, such as focused responses to particular questions, part of a dialogue journal, where the instructor and student carry on a conversation through the journal, or open-ended and closer to freewriting.

Freewriting or Quickwrites: These (usually) in-class activities help students work through what they know and understand and what they don’t know, which helps instructors gauge student comprehension. They also serve as effective invention strategies, especially for blocked or anxious writers.

Role-playing writing: Students might be asked to write a dialogue to explore another person’s role or perspective, or “record” an imagined interview with an author, expert, or someone holding a contrary opinion.

E-writing: Electronic discourse is becoming more commonly used for informal low-stakes writing. Students might be asked to participate in online chats, post to a bulletin board, or take part in an email discussion. Students might also be asked to create their own blog or respond to blog entries, though the public nature of blogs and blog postings complicates the idea of informality.

Reading Student Writing Rhetorically

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Instructors in all disciplines recognize the importance of writing to learning. Three-fourths or more of instructors respond that students learn more in courses where writing is required, and nearly all say that good writing skills are important to success in their fields. Why then do nearly two-thirds of instructors report that they do not have time to assign or respond to writing? As any experienced instructor knows, this survey data is not contradictory. When most instructors report not having time to assign writing, they are probably referring to not having time to respond to student writing.

Careful reading of and commenting on student writing can be very time-consuming, but it doesn't have to be. Here are a few simple changes that can dramatically reduce the time required to comment on student writing:

1. Instructors can incorporate more low-stakes writing in their courses, where students gain the benefits that come from increased writing without instructors suffering the burden of increased "grading."
2. Instructors can create more effective writing assignments that help students identify the purpose, audience and genre of the assignment and therefore produce better work.
3. Instructors can develop clear grading criteria that help students understand how their work will be evaluated, and help instructors evaluate that work.
4. Instructors can read more "rhetorically" and less prescriptively.

Arguably the most controversial of the above suggestions is the last, and yet adopting it would probably have the greatest positive impact on instructor workload and student writing. For many instructors much of the time spent responding to student writing is really time spent editing someone else's text. While instructors should pay some attention to correctness and clarity, usually the student's greater need is rhetorical.

To read rhetorically is to read as the audience, to assume the position of reader for the writer and respond accordingly. The shift is subtle but powerful. The teacher is the authority and pronounces on correctness and incorrectness. The reader is not the authority (the writer is) and can only comment on the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the presentation. When the instructor responds rhetorically, the discussion about student writing shifts from rules and prescriptions to purposes and choices.

Emphasizing the rhetoric of student writing focuses attention on the effects (intended and unintended) produced by the writing and the kinds of questions readers ask, which can be divided into the following categories:

Focus: What is the text about? Does the writer tell me early on or do I have to hunt around to find it? Do I always know what the focus of the text is or are there places where I'm unsure? Has the writer neglected to discuss other aspects implied by the main idea(s)?

Development: Is special and detailed knowledge required to understand what the writer is saying? Does the writer (incorrectly) assume readers possess this knowledge? Is the evidence or description adequate to the task? Am I persuaded by the evidence? Is the description detailed enough for the writer's purpose?

Organization: Is the organization of the material effective given the writer's purpose? Does the writer recognize and effectively employ the conventions of this genre?

The Triage Approach

The following procedure was developed for writing tutors by Dr. John Edlund, now at Cal Poly Pomona.

Skim the draft quickly to find the major problems or areas of possible improvement.

Respond to the draft by identifying problems at the global level, the sentence level, and the grammatical level.

Global/Rhetorical (the paper as a whole)

Considering the audience and format required by the assignment or the purpose for the writing:

• Do the content, tone, organizational scheme, and other characteristics serve the writer’s intention?
• What fairly simple changes would immediately improve the paper’s readability or effectiveness?

Syntax/Style (Readability or sentence-level negotiation of meaning)

• Is the text “readable” (easy to process)? If not, what is the problem?
• Are any sentences awkward, unclear, or incomprehensible?

Grammatical Systems

• Are there consistent problems with particular grammatical forms?
• Can “consciousness raising” facilitate acquisition of these forms?
• What would you put on a “personal proofreading checklist” for this student?

Research and Information Literacy

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The most recent Composition Conversation focused on information literacy, but the discussion quickly turned to teaching research skills and research writing in first-year writing courses. This shift was unsurprisingly given the close connection between research and information literacy. If research is the university’s attempt to institutionalize inquiry and each student’s attempt to discover his or her intellectual curiosity, then information literacy identifies the foundational skills necessary to feed that desire to know.

The conversation initially focused on the resources available to help ENGL 102 instructors incorporate information literacy in their courses. A range of instructional materials were developed by CSULA librarian Catherine Haras and have been available online at the composition faculty resources web site since September 2008. These materials include exercises that encourage students to explore the library’s resources and think about the different types of research materials available. Also included are sample assignments and guidelines for incorporating and assessing student research specifically in ENGL 102.

Several participants also mentioned class visits to the library to participate in research workshops. These workshops introduce information literacy skills and help students navigate the wealth of resources available. All participants commented on the success of these workshops, though some suggested they were underutilized and others reported the concerns expressed by the librarians that students could be better prepared. The librarians have suggested that instructors could do the following to make the most of the library visit: 1) Review the materials on information literacy posted on the Composition Faculty resources page; and 2) Help students develop a focus for their research assignment prior to the library visit and even have students send their topics to the librarian so that he or she can prepare specifically for the students’ research focus.

While the availability of these resources makes it possible to teach research in a first-year writing course, some participants noted that ENGL 102 is merely one piece of the puzzle. Just as first-year writing courses are not solely responsible for writing instruction at the university, ENGL 102 is not solely responsible for ensuring information literacy competency. Some even wondered whether research was appropriate in a first-year writing course, noting that the teaching of research in first-year writing is a controversial subject. The Writing Program Administrators (WPA) Outcomes statement for first-year composition did not initially include any outcomes related to research and only later added one under the category “Composing in Electronic Environments.” Some experts believe research is better taught in the disciplines, and of course students’ research experience at the university will hopefully include several self-initiated and self-directed research projects in their major courses. But as one participant observed, research skills like writing skills develop slowly over time and after much practice. While we can’t “inoculate” them with information literacy, we can expose them to the process. If we attempt to teach a “product,” we will almost always fail because the research project is a discipline-specific genre. If we attempt to teach a “process,” we can help students conduct independent research and join the academic research community.

Core Information Competencies: An Outline

The CSULA information literate student can:

1. Define the research topic and the need for information
2. Access information effectively and efficiently
3. Evaluate information critically
4. Organize, synthesize, and communicate information for a specific purpose
5. Ethically and legally access and use information

(taken from “Core Information Competencies” developed by the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library, CSULA)

Information Literacy Instructional Materials

The following materials developed by the JFK Library are available on the Composition Faculty Resources web site (http://www.calstatela.edu/academic/english/cinfolit.php)

Library Exercises:

• Information Diary
• Narrowing a Topic
• Managing What You Find: Research Journal
• Scholarly Journal or Popular Magazine
• Web Site Evaluation

ENGL 102 Materials

• Constructing the ENGL 102 Research Assignment
• Model Rubric for ENGL 102 Research Outcomes

Library Research Tutorial

• http://www.calstatela.edu/library/research/

Reading and Curiosity

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To observe that curiosity is central to reading is not unlike observing that breathing is necessary to life. But what is curiosity? And if it is so important to reading, how can we as teachers foster it? Artists, philosophers and scientists have long been interested in curiosity and have frequently associated it with appetite. Edmund Burke claimed that curiosity “has an appetite,” and we speak casually of a hunger or thirst for knowledge, of curiosity as something beyond our conscious control and demanding to be satisfied. Philosophers speak of curiosity as a desire to know that exists independent of the utility of knowing and therefore is different from a simple need for cognition. We might feel the need to know how to complete a form, but that is not curiosity. We might feel the need to know whether Bono has a real name, but that too is not curiosity. In the first case the desire is instrumental and in the second it is essentially generic, part of the general stockpiling of knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Curiosity requires what philosophers call a motivationally original desire to know something. In other words, curiosity is a desire to know that originates with and belongs to the individual. It is my desire to know. It is essentially involuntary, non-utilitarian, and deeply personal.

And therein lies the problem. As commentators on and reformers of education have noted at least since Socrates, curiosity is central not only to reading but to the active intellectual engagement with the world that is the ultimate goal of education. But as most of these same commentators have noted, educational institutions seem perversely designed to stifle curiosity. According to one expert, the teacher’s goal ought to be “to protect the spirit of inquiry, to keep it from becoming ... fossilized through dogmatic instruction, or dissipated by random exercise upon trivial things.” That one hundred years ago John Dewey needed to emphasize the importance of inquiry and that one hundred years later these same words seem to speak directly to our times suggests either that there really is very little new under the sun or that fostering inquiry and curiosity is something we find easy to claim but difficult to enact.

Perhaps here as elsewhere we can trace our Anglo-American roots. Matthew Arnold, writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, noted that the word “curiosity,” which in other languages was used positively to denote “a high and fine quality” of human nature, was in English a negative term associated with idleness. It was the English after all who made curiosity fatal to felines. We might disagree with Arnold’s comparative linguistics, but his observation that we are uncomfortable with curiosity—the “free play of the mind on all subjects”—and too easily satisfied with “very inadequate ideas” should strike us as all-too-familiar.

Curiosity, with its tendency to ask questions and to question the answers, discomforts the status quo and dissatisfies the self-satisfied. Dewey wrote one hundred years ago, “In the feeling, however dim, that the facts which directly meet the senses are not the whole story, that there is more behind them and more to come from them, lies the germ of intellectual curiosity.” We might ask ourselves what we do in the classroom to encourage this dim feeling, to help students form the authentic questions that will help them satisfy their motivationally original desire to know that belongs only to them. We might ask ourselves what we do to protect the spirit of inquiry and each student’s curiosity.

From John Stuart Mill

Last year marked the sesquicentennial of the publication of J. S. Mill’s On Liberty. The following is taken from the conclusion, where Mill addresses the possibility of state-controlled education and warns of its dangers if it becomes too focused on basic skills and vocational competencies.

“The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it; and a State which postpones the interests of [each individual’s] mental expansion and elevation, to a little more of administrative skill, or that semblance of it which practice gives, in the details of business; a State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes—will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish” (Chapter 5).

Engaging with Texts

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We spend a lot of time in the English Department thinking about texts, whether they are in the form of a physical book written by a famous writer or in the form of the world as a text. We teach texts and produce texts. We require students to read texts and we hope that they will produce texts of their own. Given our passion for texts, is it any wonder that our composition courses focus on helping students engage with texts. In fact, our recent revision of the ENGL 096 scoring guide associates strong writing with meaningful and appropriate “engagement” with texts and adequate or inadequate writing with routine or minimal “response” to texts. But what exactly is the nature of that engagement? What are we asking students to do?

At least part of what we expect students to do is very mechanical. Quotation, paraphrase, and summary, the differences between them and their appropriate uses often occupy parts of several class meetings and feature prominently on learning objectives for first-year writing courses. Then there is the arcane and seemingly impenetrable world of citation and proper bibliographic format. MLA, APA, Chicago, ACS, CBE, ASCE, IEEE, AIM, AIP and other equally mysterious conventions probably strike students as cruel and perverse. Certainly some part, perhaps an inordinate part, of what we expect students to do with texts is mere machinery.

We also expect students to be capable information gatherers. Texts represent repositories of information, data that students hopefully transform into knowledge. But as students become more experienced readers and writers, they hopefully become more analytical and critical as both readers and writers. Texts that stood before as irreproachable in their authority might be subjected to increasing skepticism when viewed against a background of contradictory texts, conflicting perspectives and controversy over what counts as “fact.” Once the bulwark of unthinking deference has been breached, texts become less and less pronouncements from on high and more and more lived rhetorical documents governed by the very real human concerns of purpose, audience and conventions. It is finally at this stage that we encounter something that looks familiar to experienced readers and writers.

Rather than asking what we expect students to do with texts, perhaps we should have started by asking what we do with texts, or even more simply, why we read. Readers might respond that they read because they want to know, learn, feel, experience. “There is no frigate like a book,” according to Emily Dickenson. Perhaps the pleasure we derive from reading comes from the raising and satisfying of this curiosity that appears at the center of our reading experience. Reading, as Peter Brooks notes, might be tied up with desire, a kind of “epistemophilia” that motivates us to become involved and invested in the text.

Curiosity it seems is at the center of our reading experience. Without curiosity and the pleasure that goes with it, students will struggle to move from passively “responding” to texts to actively “engaging,” becoming entangled in and grappling with texts. Active reading strategies can help students enter into a conversation with the text. We can also help by modeling the kinds of conversations we have with texts, and by facilitating the kinds of conversations we want to have about texts. Most important though might be helping students recognize their own curiosity and the pleasures of asking the right question.

Encouraging Active Reading and Inquiry

• Before beginning a new reading, especially one in a new genre, it is important to create the context for the reading. Why are students being asked to read this text? What kinds of questions might they have? What might prove difficult to them?
• Encourage students to read actively, making notes and carrying on a conversation with the text.
• Encourage students to record their initial impressions and questions immediately after reading. What were they thinking about at the end? What did they find satisfying? What did they find unsatisfying? What questions do they still have?
• Encourage students to relate the “knowledge” of the text to what they already know. What did they read that was new? What was surprising? How has the “knowledge” of the text altered their thinking?
• Encourage (or require) students to prepare “authentic” questions for sharing with the class. An “authentic” question is the student’s own question—one is which he or she is invested and to which he or she is likely to persist in seeking answers.

Recap of Composition Conversation-Effective Writing Assignments

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The most recent Composition Conversation focused on one of the most rewarding and difficult tasks faced by teachers of writing: designing effective writing assignments. Many of the ideas that emerged in the discussion applied not merely to designing writing assignments but to good teaching practice. Two key insights dominated: developing good assignments takes time and frequent revision, and students benefit when challenged to come up with their own ideas and their own way of presenting them.

The conversation began with a litany of best practices, some obvious, others less so. All agreed that assignments should be in writing and that instructors needed to devote sufficient class time to going over the assignment. The assignment should focus on what students were supposed to do (not simply what they were not supposed to do). If the assignment required a specific process, the assignment should specify those steps as explicitly as possible. As much as possible, the criteria to be used to evaluate the work should be made clear at the time of the assignment. One participant noted that students often use an assignment sheet like a recipe—the clearer and more explicit we can make our instructions and expectations, the better the results.

Where do the good assignments come from? Most participants could recall starting with writing assignments of their predecessors, colleagues, and possibly teachers. “The best teacher is the best student” is one formulation of this common adage. Another is “the best teacher is the best thief.” But participants noted that while good teachers might start with the work of others, they also personalize and refine assignments over time. Everyone could recount some terrible essay assignment they inflicted on students, but everyone could also recall “fixing” the “bad” topics through revision. One participant offered this instructive advice: make notes on a topic as you read student responses to it. These notes might address what students do well, what they do poorly, and how students might have misread the topic. The notes might be simpler: “Never use this topic again!” The key is recognizing that developing a good assignment is not very different from developing a good technical document—the teacher needs to know his/her purpose, his/her audience, and must be willing to test the document on actual users to find out whether it works, and use the feedback of readers to improve each draft.

What characterizes a good assignment? All agreed that good assignments allow students to develop their own ideas and their own ways of presenting them. Usually from the best of intentions assignments become overly directive and limiting, and substitute the instructor’s thinking for the student’s. “Helping” easily slips into “doing for.” Sometimes students are given little or no choice in their response and struggle to work within the narrow limitations of a single topic to which they must but cannot respond, or an overly simple task that leaves them with little to do other than repeat the argument of the assignment. Some participants noted that some students imaginatively go beyond a topic, but by doing so produce an essay that runs the risk of appearing “off-topic.” In portfolio-assessed classes, the danger is other readers might see such license as signaling an inability to respond to an assignment. But teachers can usually distinguish between innovation and inability. in short, students benefit from our high expectations and suffer when we oversimplify what is in fact complex.

Questions to Ask When Designing an Assignment

• What purpose are students attempting to accomplish with their writing?
• Who's the audience for their writing? How much do students know about this audience?
• How familiar are my students with this genre of writing?
• How long should the paper be? Why this length?
• What is the assignment’s central task? What at a minimum must they do?
• What might students find difficult about this assignment? How can I help them without limiting them?
• Is there a specific sequence of steps or process that will help students write a successful essay? Does this process allow opportunities for feedback and revision?
• What are my evaluation criteria? How well do these criteria line up with my goals for this assignment?
  

Questions a Student Might Ask of an Assignment

• What is the instructor’s purpose in creating this assignment? What am I supposed to demonstrate?
• What exactly am I supposed to do?
• What is the process? What steps are required to do the assignment properly?
• Who, other than the instructor, might read or use this document?
• How will the instructor know the best papers from the worst?