978 0 393 63168 5

what they’re saying about “they say / i say”

“The best book that’s happened to teaching composition—

ever!”

—Karen Gaffney, Raritan Valley Community College

“This book demystifies rhetorical moves, tricks of the trade that

many students are unsure about. It’s reasonable, helpful, nicely

written … and hey, it’s true. I would have found it immensely

helpful myself in high school and college.”

—Mike Rose, University of California, Los Angeles

“The argument of this book is important—that there are

‘moves’ to academic writing … and that knowledge of them

can be generative. The template format is a good way to teach

and demystify the moves that matter. I like this book a lot.”

—David Bartholomae, University of Pittsburgh

“My students are from diverse backgrounds and the topics in

this book help them to empathize with others who are differ-

ent from them.”

—Steven Bailey, Central Michigan University

“A beautifully lucid way to approach argument—different from

any rhetoric I’ve ever seen.”

—Anne-Marie Thomas, Austin Community College, Riverside

“Students need to walk a fine line between their work and that

of others, and this book helps them walk that line, providing

specific methods and techniques for introducing, explaining,

and integrating other voices with their own ideas.”

—Libby Miles, University of Vermont

“‘They Say’ with Readings is different from other rhetorics and

readers in that it really engages students in the act of writing

throughout the book. It’s less a ‘here’s how’ book and more of

a ‘do this with me’ kind of book.”

—Kelly Ritter, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

“It offers students the formulas we, as academic writers, all carry

in our heads.”

—Karen Gardiner, University of Alabama

“Many students say that it is the first book they’ve found that

actually helps them with writing in all disciplines.”

—Laura Sonderman, Marshall University

“As a WPA, I’m constantly thinking about how I can help

instructors teach their students to make specific rhetorical

moves on the page. This book offers a powerful way of teach-

ing students to do just that.” —Joseph Bizup, Boston University

“The best tribute to ‘ They Say / I Say’ I’ve heard is this, from a

student: ‘This is one book I’m not selling back to the bookstore.’

Nods all around the room. The students love this book.”

—Christine Ross, Quinnipiac University

“My students love this book. They tell me that the idea of

‘entering a conversation’ really makes sense to them in a way

that academic writing hasn’t before.”

—Karen Henderson, Helena College University of Montana

“A concise and practical text at a great price; students love it.”

—Jeff Pruchnic, Wayne State University

“ ‘ They Say’ contains the best collection of articles I have found.

Students respond very well to the readings.”

—Julia Ruengert, Pensacola State College

“It’s the anti-composition text: Fun, creative, humorous, bril-

liant, effective.”

—Perry Cumbie, Durham Technical Community College

“A brilliant book… . It’s like a membership card in the aca-

demic club.”

—Eileen Seifert, DePaul University

“The ability to engage with the thoughts of others is one of the

most important skills taught in any college-level writing course,

and this book does as good a job teaching that skill as any text I

have ever encountered.” —William Smith, Weatherford College

F O U R T H E D I T I O N

“THEY SAY I SAY”

T h e M o v e s T h a t M a t t e r

i n A c a d e m i c W r i t i n g

W I T H R E A D I N G S

H

GERALD GRAFF

CATHY BIRKENSTEIN

both of the University of Illinois at Chicago

RUSSEL DURST

University of Cincinnati

B

w . w . n o r t o n & c o m p a n y

n e w y o r k | l o n d o n

W. W. Norton & Company has been independent since its founding in 1923, when

William Warder Norton and Mary D. Herter Norton first published lectures delivered

at the People’s Institute, the adult education division of New York City’s Cooper

Union. The firm soon expanded its program beyond the Institute, publishing books by

celebrated academics from America and abroad. By mid-century, the two major pillars of

Norton’s publishing program—trade books and college texts—were firmly established.

In the 1950s, the Norton family transferred control of the company to its employees,

and today—with a staff of four hundred and a comparable number of trade, college,

and professional titles published each year—W. W. Norton & Company

stands as the

largest and oldest publishing house owned wholly by its employees.

Copyright © 2018, 2017, 2015, 2014, 2012, 2010, 2009, 2006

by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Permission to use copyrighted material is included in the credits section of this

book, which begins on page 731.

ISBN 978-0-393-63168-5

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 15 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BS

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

To the great rhetorician Wayne Booth,

who cared deeply

about the democratic art

of listening closely to what others say.

contents

preface to the fourth edition xi

preface: Demystifying Academic Conversation xvii

introduction: Entering the Conversation 1

PART 1. “THEY SAY”

1 “they say”: Starting with What Others Are Saying 19

2 “her point is”: The Art of Summarizing 30

3 “as he himself puts it”: The Art of Quoting 43

PART 2. “I SAY”

4 “yes / no / okay, but”: Three Ways to Respond 53

5 “and yet”: Distinguishing What You Say

from What They Say 67

http://wwnorton.com
6 “skeptics may object”:

Planting a Naysayer in Your Text 77

7 “so what? who cares?”: Saying Why It Matters 91

PART 3. T YING IT ALL TOGETHER

8 “as a result”: Connecting the Parts 101

9 “you mean i can just say it that way?”:

Academic Writing Doesn’t Mean Setting Aside

Your Own Voice 117

10 “but don’t get me wrong”:

The Art of Metacommentary 131

11 “he says contends”: Using the Templates to Revise 141

PART 4 . IN SPECIFIC ACADEMIC CONTEXTS

12 “i take your point”: Entering Class Discussions 162

13 don’t make them scroll up:

Entering Online Conversations 166

v i i

C O N T E N T S

14 what’s motivating this writer?:

Reading for the Conversation 176

15 “analyze this”: Writing in the Social Sciences 187

readings

16 HOW CAN WE BRIDGE THE DIFFERENCES

THAT DIVIDE US? 209

sean blanda, The “Other Side” Is Not Dumb 212

danah boyd, Why America Is Self-Segregating 219

michelle alexander, The New Jim Crow 230

j. d. vance, Hillbilly Elegy 251

gabriela moro, Minority Student Clubs: Segregation or

Integration? 269

robert leonard, Why Rural America Voted for Trump 279

joseph e. stiglitz, A Tax System Stacked against

the 99 Percent 286

barack obama, Howard University Commencement

Speech 296

17 IS COLLEGE THE BEST OPTION? 315

stephanie owen and isabel sawhill, Should Everyone

Go to College? 318

sanford j. ungar, The New Liberal Arts 336

charles murray, Are Too Many People

Going to College? 344

liz addison, Two Years Are Better Than Four 365

gerald graff, Hidden Intellectualism 369

mike rose, Blue-Collar Brilliance 377

ben casselman, Shut Up about Harvard 390

steve kolowich, On the Front Lines of a

New Culture War 398

v i i i

Contents

18 ARE WE IN A RACE AGAINST THE MACHINE? 421

nicholas carr, Is Google Making Us Stupid? 424

clive thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How

Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better 441

michaela cullington, Does Texting Affect Writing? 462

jenna wortham, How I Learned to Love Snapchat 474

carole cadwalladr, Google, Democracy, and the Truth

about Internet Search 480

kenneth goldsmith, Go Ahead: Waste Time on

the Internet 500

sherry turkle, No Need to Call 505

zeynep tufekci, Does a Protest’s Size Matter? 525

19 WHAT’S GENDER GOT TO DO WITH IT? 531

anne-marie slaughter, Why Women Still Can’t

Have It All 534

richard dorment, Why Men Still Can’t Have It All 555

raynard kington, I’m Gay and African American. As a

Dad, I Still Have It Easier Than Working Moms. 576

laurie frankel, From He to She in First Grade 583

andrew reiner, Teaching Men to Be

Emotionally Honest 589

stephen mays, What about Gender Roles in

Same-Sex Relationships? 596

kate crawford, Artificial Intelligence’s White Guy

Problem 599

nicholas eberstadt, Men without Work 605

20 WHAT’S THERE TO EAT? 621

michael pollan, Escape from the Western Diet 624

olga khazan, Why Don’t Convenience Stores Sell

Better Food? 632

i x

C O N T E N T S

mary maxfield, Food as Thought: Resisting the

Moralization of Eating 641

david zinczenko, Don’t Blame the Eater 647

radley balko, What You Eat Is Your Business 651

michael moss, The Extraordinary Science of Addictive

Junk Food 656

david h. freedman, How Junk Food Can End Obesity 681

sara goldrick-rab, katharine broton, emily brunjes colo,

Expanding the National School Lunch Program to

Higher Education 713

credits 731

acknowledgments 737

index of templates 751

index of authors and titles 767

x

preface

to the fourth edition

H

When we first set out to write this book, our goal

was simple: to offer a version of “They Say / I Say”: The Moves

That Matter in Academic Writing with an anthology of readings

that would demonstrate the rhetorical moves “that matter.”

And because “They Say” teaches students that academic writ-

ing is a means of entering a conversation, we looked for read-

ings on topics that would engage students and inspire them to

respond—and to enter the conversations.

Our purpose in writing “They Say” has always been to

offer students a user-friendly model of writing that will help

them put into practice the important principle that writing

is a social activity. Proceeding from the premise that effec-

tive writers enter conversations of other writers and speakers,

this book encourages students to engage with those around

them—including those who disagree with them—instead of

just expressing their ideas “logically.” We believe it’s a model

more necessary than ever in today’s increasingly diverse—and

some might say divided—society. In this spirit, we have added

a new chapter, “How Can We Bridge the Differences That

Divide Us?,” with readings that represent different perspectives

on those divides—and what we might do to overcome them.

Our own experience teaching first-year writing students has

led us to believe that to be persuasive, arguments need not

only supporting evidence but also motivation and exigency,

x i

P R E F A C E T O T H E F O U R T H E D I T I O N

and that the surest way to achieve this motivation and exigency

is to generate one’s own arguments as a response to those of

others—to something “they say.” To help students write their

way into the often daunting conversations of academia and the

wider public sphere, the book provides templates to help them

make sophisticated rhetorical moves that they might otherwise

not think of attempting. And of course learning to make these

rhetorical moves in writing also helps students become better

readers of argument.

The two versions of “They Say / I Say” are now being taught

at more than 1,500 schools, which suggests that there is a wide-

spread desire for explicit instruction that is understandable but

not oversimplified, to help writers negotiate the basic moves

necessary to “enter the conversation.” Instructors have told us

how much this book helps their students learn how to write

academic discourse, and some students have written to us saying

that it’s helped them to “crack the code,” as one student put it.

This fourth edition of “They Say / I Say” with Readings

includes forty readings—half of them new—on five compel-

ling and controversial issues. The selections provide a glimpse

into some important conversations taking place today—and

will, we hope, provoke students to respond and thus to join in

those conversations.

highlights

Forty readings that will prompt students to think—and write.

Taken from a wide variety of sources, including the Chronicle

of Higher Education, the Washington Post, the New York Times,

the Wall Street Journal, medium.com, best-selling books, policy reports, student-run journals, celebrated speeches, and more,

x i i

Preface to the Fourth Edition

the readings represent a range of perspectives on five important

issues:

• How Can We Bridge the Differences That Divide Us?

• Is College the Best Option?

• Are We in a Race against the Machine?

• What’s Gender Got to Do with It?

• What’s There to Eat?

The readings can function as sources for students’ own writing,

and the study questions that follow each reading focus students’

attention on how each author uses the key rhetorical moves

taught in the book. Additionally, one question invites students

to write, and often to respond with their own views.

Two books in one, with a rhetoric up front and readings

in the back. The two parts are linked by cross-references in

the margins, leading from the rhetoric to specific examples in

the readings and from the readings to the corresponding writ-

ing instruction. Teachers can therefore begin with either the

rhetoric or the readings, and the links will facilitate movement

between one section and the other.

A chapter on reading (Chapter 14) encourages students to

http://medium.com
think of reading as an act of entering conversations. Instead

of teaching students merely to identify the author’s argument,

this chapter shows them how to read with an eye for what

arguments the author is responding to—in other words, to

think carefully about why the writer is making the argument in

the first place, and thus to recognize (and ultimately become

a part of) the larger conversation that gives meaning to read-

ing the text.

x i i i

P R E F A C E T O T H E F O U R T H E D I T I O N

what’s new

A new chapter, “How Can We Bridge the Differences That

Divide Us?,” brings together diverse perspectives on some of

the issues that have been a source of division in our country,

with readings that offer possible ways to overcome those divi-

sions—from Sean Blanda’s “The Other Side Is Not Dumb” to J. D.

Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.

Half of the readings are new, with at least one documented

piece and one student essay in each chapter, added in response

to requests from many teachers who wanted more complex and

documented writing. In the technology and gender chapters,

half of the readings are new, with essays on fake news, wasting

time online (and why that’s a good thing), and men without

work, among others. The education chapter now includes an

essay on problematic elitism in some circles of higher education

and another on one college’s quest to foster tolerance among

its diverse student body. Finally, the food chapter now asks a

slightly different question: what (if anything) is there to eat?

An updated chapter on academic language (now called “You

Mean I Can Just Say It That Way?”) underscores the need to

bridge spheres that are too often kept separate: everyday lan-

guage and academic writing.

A new chapter on entering online conversations further

underscores the importance of including a “they say” when

responding to others on blogs, class discussion boards, and the

like, showing how the rhetorical moves taught in this book can

help students contribute clearly and respectfully to conversa-

tions in digital spaces.

x i v

Preface to the Fourth Edition

New examples—15 in total—appear throughout the rhetoric,

from Deborah Tannen and Charles Murray to Nicholas Carr

and Michelle Alexander.

An updated chapter on writing in the social sciences reflects

a broader range of writing assignments with examples from aca-

demic publications in sociology, psychology, and political science.

what’s online

Online tutorials give students hands-on practice recognizing

and using the rhetorical moves taught in this book both as

readers and writers. Each tutorial helps students read a full

essay with an eye on these moves and then respond to a writing

prompt using templates from the book.

They Say / I Blog. Updated monthly, this blog provides up-to-

the-minute readings on the issues covered in the book, along

with questions that prompt students to literally join the con-

versation. Check it out at theysayiblog.com.

Instructor’s Guide. Now available in print, the guide includes

expanded in-class activities, sample syllabi, summaries of

http://theysayiblog.com
each chapter and reading, and a chapter on using the online

resources, including They Say / I Blog.

Ebook. Searchable, portable, and interactive. The complete

textbook for a fraction of the price. Students can interact with

the text—take notes, bookmark, search, and highlight. The

ebook can be viewed on—and synced between—all computers

and mobile devices.

x v

P R E F A C E T O T H E F O U R T H E D I T I O N

InQuizitive for Writers. Adaptive, game-like exercises help

students practice editing, focusing especially on the errors that

matter.

Coursepack. Norton resources you can add to your online,

hybrid, or lecture course—all at no cost. Norton Coursepacks

work within your existing learning management system; there’s

no new system to learn, and access is free and easy. Customizable

resources include assignable writing prompts from theysayiblog

.com, quizzes on grammar and documentation, documentation guides, model student essays, and more.

Find it all at digital.wwnorton.com/theysayreadings4 or contact your Norton representative for more information.

We hope that this new edition of “They Say / I Say” with Read-

ings will spark students’ interest in some of the most pressing

conversations of our day and provide them with some of the

tools they need to engage in those conversations with dexterity

and confidence.

Gerald Graff

Cathy Birkenstein

Russel Durst

x v i

http://theysayiblog.com
http://theysayiblog.com
http://digital.wwnorton.com/theysayreadings4
preface

Demystifying Academic Conversation

H

Experienced writing instructors have long recognized

that writing well means entering into conversation with others.

Academic writing in particular calls upon writers not simply to

express their own ideas, but to do so as a response to what others

have said. The first-year writing program at our own university,

according to its mission statement, asks “students to partici-

pate in ongoing conversations about vitally important academic

and public issues.” A similar statement by another program

holds that “intellectual writing is almost always composed in

response to others’ texts.” These statements echo the ideas

of rhetorical theorists like Kenneth Burke, Mikhail Bakhtin,

and Wayne Booth as well as recent composition scholars like

David Bartholomae, John Bean, Patricia Bizzell, Irene Clark,

Greg Colomb, Lisa Ede, Peter Elbow, Joseph Harris, Andrea

Lunsford, Elaine Maimon, Gary Olson, Mike Rose, John Swales

and Christine Feak, Tilly Warnock, and others who argue that

writing well means engaging the voices of others and letting

them in turn engage us.

Yet despite this growing consensus that writing is a social,

conversational act, helping student writers actually partici-

pate in these conversations remains a formidable challenge.

This book aims to meet that challenge. Its goal is to demys-

tify academic writing by isolating its basic moves, explaining

x v i i

P R E F A C E

them clearly, and representing them in the form of templates.

In this way, we hope to help students become active partici-

pants in the important conversations of the academic world

and the wider public sphere.

highlights

• Shows that writing well means entering a conversation, sum-

marizing others (“they say”) to set up one’s own argument

(“I say”).

• Demystifies academic writing, showing students “the moves

that matter” in language they can readily apply.

• Provides user-friendly templates to help writers make those

moves in their own writing.

• Includes a chapter on reading, showing students how the

authors they read are part of a conversation that they them-

selves can enter—and thus to see reading as a matter not

of passively absorbing information but of understanding and

actively entering dialogues and debates.

how this book came to be

The original idea for this book grew out of our shared interest in

democratizing academic culture. First, it grew out of arguments

that Gerald Graff has been making throughout his career that

schools and colleges need to invite students into the conversa-

tions and debates that surround them. More specifically, it is a

practical, hands-on companion to his recent book, Clueless in

Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind, in which

he looks at academic conversations from the perspective of

those who find them mysterious and proposes ways in which

x v i i i

Demystifying Academic Conversation

such mystification can be overcome. Second, this book grew

out of writing templates that Cathy Birkenstein developed in

the 1990s, for use in writing and literature courses she was

teaching. Many students, she found, could readily grasp what it

meant to support a thesis with evidence, to entertain a counter-

argument, to identify a textual contradiction, and ultimately

to summarize and respond to challenging arguments, but they

often had trouble putting these concepts into practice in their

own writing. When Cathy sketched out templates on the board,

however, giving her students some of the language and patterns

that these sophisticated moves require, their writing—and even

their quality of thought—significantly improved.

This book began, then, when we put our ideas together and

realized that these templates might have the potential to open

up and clarify academic conversation. We proceeded from the

premise that all writers rely on certain stock formulas that they

themselves didn’t invent—and that many of these formulas

are so commonly used that they can be represented in model

templates that students can use to structure and even generate

what they want to say.

As we developed a working draft of this book, we began using

it in first-year writing courses that we teach at UIC. In class-

room exercises and writing assignments, we found that students

who otherwise struggled to organize their thoughts, or even to

think of something to say, did much better when we provided

them with templates like the following.

j In discussions of

, a controversial issue is whether

. While some argue that

, others contend

that

.

j This is not to say that

.

x i x

P R E F A C E

One virtue of such templates, we found, is that they focus

writers’ attention not just on what is being said, but on the

forms that structure what is being said. In other words, they

make students more conscious of the rhetorical patterns that

are key to academic success but often pass under the classroom

radar.

the centrality of “they say / i say”

The central rhetorical move that we focus on in this book is

the “they say / I say” template that gives our book its title. In our

view, this template represents the deep, underlying structure,

the internal DNA as it were, of all effective argument. Effective

persuasive writers do more than make well-supported claims

(“I say”); they also map those claims relative to the claims of

others (“they say”).

Here, for example, the “they say / I say” pattern structures a

passage from an essay by the media and technology critic Steven

Johnson.

For decades, we’ve worked under the assumption that mass cul-

ture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-

denominator standards, presumably because the “masses” want

dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies try to give the

masses what they want. But … the exact opposite is happening:

the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less.

Steven Johnson, “Watching TV Makes You Smarter”

In generating his own argument from something “they say,”

Johnson suggests why he needs to say what he is saying: to

correct a popular misconception.

x x

Demystifying Academic Conversation

Even when writers do not explicitly identify the views they

are responding to, as Johnson does, an implicit “they say” can

often be discerned, as in the following passage by Zora Neale

Hurston.

I remember the day I became colored.

Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”

In order to grasp Hurston’s point here, we need to be able to

reconstruct the implicit view she is responding to and question-

ing: that racial identity is an innate quality we are simply born

with. On the contrary, Hurston suggests, our race is imposed

on us by society—something we “become” by virtue of how

we are treated.

As these examples suggest, the “they say / I say” model can

improve not just student writing, but student reading compre-

hension as well. Since reading and writing are deeply recipro-

cal activities, students who learn to make the rhetorical moves

represented by the templates in this book figure to become more

adept at identifying these same moves in the texts they read. And

if we are right that effective arguments are always in dialogue

with other arguments, then it follows that in order to understand

the types of challenging texts assigned in college, students need

to identify the views to which those texts are responding.

Working with the “they say / I say” model can also help with

invention, finding something to say. In our experience, students

best discover what they want to say not by thinking about a

subject in an isolation booth, but by reading texts, listening

closely to what other writers say, and looking for an opening

through which they can enter the conversation. In other words,

listening closely to others and summarizing what they have to

say can help writers generate their own ideas.

x x i

P R E F A C E

the usefulness of templates

Our templates also have a generative quality, prompting stu-

dents to make moves in their writing that they might not oth-

erwise make or even know they should make. The templates

in this book can be particularly helpful for students who are

unsure about what to say, or who have trouble finding enough

to say, often because they consider their own beliefs so

self-evident that they need not be argued for. Students like this

are often helped, we’ve found, when we give them a simple tem-

plate like the following one for entertaining a counterargument

(or planting a naysayer, as we call it in Chapter 6).

j Of course some might object that

. Although I concede

that

, I still maintain that

.

What this particular template helps students do is make the

seemingly counterintuitive move of questioning their own

beliefs, of looking at them from the perspective of those who

disagree. In so doing, templates can bring out aspects of stu-

dents’ thoughts that, as they themselves sometimes remark,

they didn’t even realize were there.

Other templates in this book help students make a host of

sophisticated moves that they might not otherwise make: sum-

marizing what someone else says, framing a quotation in one’s

own words, indicating the view that the writer is responding to,

marking the shift from a source’s view to the writer’s own view,

offering evidence for that view, entertaining and answering

counterarguments, and explaining what is at stake in the first

place. In showing students how to make such moves, templates

do more than organize students’ ideas; they help bring those

ideas into existence.

x x i i

Demystifying Academic Conversation

“ok—but templates?”

We are aware, of course, that some instructors may have res-

ervations about templates. Some, for instance, may object that

such formulaic devices represent a return to prescriptive forms

of instruction that encourage passive learning or lead students

to put their writing on automatic pilot.

This is an understandable reaction, we think, to kinds of rote

instruction that have indeed encouraged passivity and drained

writing of its creativity and dynamic relation to the social world.

The trouble is that many students will never learn on their own

to make the key intellectual moves that our templates repre-

sent. While seasoned writers pick up these moves unconsciously

through their reading, many students do not. Consequently, we

believe, students need to see these moves represented in the

explicit ways that the templates provide.

The aim of the templates, then, is not to stifle critical

thinking but to be direct with students about the key rhetori-

cal moves that it comprises. Since we encourage students to

modify and adapt the templates to the particularities of the

arguments they are making, using such prefabricated formulas

as learning tools need not result in writing and thinking that

are themselves formulaic. Admittedly, no teaching tool can

guarantee that students will engage in hard, rigorous thought.

Our templates do, however, provide concrete prompts that can

stimulate and shape such thought: What do “they say” about my

topic? What would a naysayer say about my argument? What

is my evidence? Do I need to qualify my point? Who cares?

In fact, templates have a long and rich history. Public orators

from ancient Greece and Rome through the European Renais-

sance studied rhetorical topoi or “commonplaces,” model passages

and formulas that represented the different strategies available

x x i i i

P R E F A C E

to public speakers. In many respects, our templates echo this

classical rhetorical tradition of imitating established models.

The journal Nature requires aspiring contributors to follow

a guideline that is like a template on the opening page of their

manuscript: “Two or three sentences explaining what the main

result [of their study] reveals in direct comparison with what was

thought to be the case previously, or how the main result adds to

previous knowledge.” In the field of education, a form designed

by the education theorist Howard Gardner asks postdoctoral

fellowship applicants to complete the following template: “Most

scholars in the field believe