One of the most popular and well-regarded books on academic writing ever written, Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s They Say, I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing, has just been published in a fourth edition.  Professors Graff and Birkenstein are, of course, university advisers of Argument-Centered Education and their book has been seminal in the development and national expansion of argument pedagogy.  If you are not using it or portions of it in your classroom — and most certainly if you are not familiar with it — I urge you to pick up a copy of this new edition and dive in.  Part of its appeal is its simplicity and usability.  They Say, I Say has the grace and pellucidity of a late-period Willem de Kooning ribbon painting; a whole lot of learning, theorizing, and teaching is condensed and distilled into what the authors call “the deep, underlying structure, the internal DNA as it were, of all effective argument.”

The preface to the fourth edition signals what guided the authors in making the few changes they made to their profound and durable textbook for academic argument.

As the twenty-first century unfolds, the increasingly polarized state of our society is making it harder to listen to those who see things differently than we do. The wider our divisions become, the harder it is to find anyone who is willing to seriously consider viewpoints that oppose their own. Too often we either avoid difficult discussions altogether, or we talk only with like-minded people, who often reinforce our pre-existing assumptions and insulate us from serious challenge. In this fourth edition of our book, therefore, we double down in a variety of ways on the importance of getting outside our isolated spheres and listening to others, even when we may not like what we hear.

So, Graff and Birkenstein indicate that they have adapted the text some to underscore its relevance and importance in an era in which argument is at once ubiquitous and high-pitched and at the same time often sloppy and uncivil, carried out on a framework that seems at risk of disintegrating — inside and outside of academia.  Its timeliness is peak.  Still, the core of the book remains helping students identify and assimilate the basic moves that are inherent to academic writing, and therefore academic argument.  In this way, the book gives students the constructs to build and express their own thinking; it demystifies the fundamental work that students are rewarded for being able to do well in school, much of which is comparable to the work that professionals are rewarded for being able to do well in an information economy.

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 idea, but to do so as a response to what others have said. . . . Yet despite this growing consensus that writing is a social, conversational act, helping student writers actually participate in these conversations remains a formidable challenge.  This book aims to meet that challenge.

They Say, I Say is probably best known for its offering of templates to help students meet the challenge of writing and speaking argumentatively in dialogue with other arguers.  These templates are thoroughly set up and contextualized within the full work, though they are also readily accessed on the internet as a stand-alone resource, and Argument-Centered Education has produced its own adapted version of argument writing constructs and templates, too.

Graff and Birkenstein have, of course, heard plenty of pushback from teachers averse to any kind of formulae in writing.  Penny Kittle and Kelly Gallagher’s recent 180 Days: Two Teachers and the Quest to Engage and Empower Adolescents (Heinemann, 2018), to take one prominent example, criticize the use of writing scaffolds that can replace students’ need to figure out how to formulate their thinking in their own authentic voice (even while they explicitly praise They Say, I Say elsewhere in the book).  “Teaching students to write in formulaic ways is a bad idea because of all the hidden practices it teaches at the same time. Students become adept at following a pattern, not at thinking of the bet ways to develop and communicate their ideas. Students become lazy in their thinking because so little thinking is required in order to write five paragraphs of similar construction from class to class, year after year” (82).  Graff and Birkenstein counter that templates provide students with the language and constructs of academic argument, which students have to fill with their own critical thought and content understanding.  “The aim of the templates is not to stifle critical thinking but to be direct with students about the key rhetorical 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” (xix).

For partner school teachers using They Say, I Say in their instruction — and this is by no means restricted to teachers of AP Composition, but is rather a high percentage of English and language arts teachers in high school and middle school, a fair number of history and social studies teachers, and a sprinkling of science teachers — I have created a set of chapter questions.  I pulled out what I take to be the six core, cross-disciplinary chapters of the book, and formulated questions that direct student attention to the key ideas in each of these chapters.  The questions ask students to summarize crucial passages and to re-formulate argumentation concepts in their own idiom.

These are not argument-based questions because they do not call on students to build arguments in response (for or against) the text’s ideas; they are more summary than critical, closer to a Level One on a Depth of Knowledge scale than a Level Three.  But, as we know, good teaching includes a blend of higher-order and lower-order questions, and this particular work intends to reinforce assimilation of the moves and constructs of argument, so that students can deploy these throughout their critical and content-rich academic work.