Need an account? Click here to sign up. Download Free PDF. They say i say. Caihua Dorji. A short summary of this paper. Download Download PDF. I would have found it immensely helpful myself in high school and college. The template format is a good way to teach and demystify the moves that matter. I like this book a lot. This book offers a powerful way of teach- ing students to do just that.
The students love this book. They are finally entering the Burkian Parlor of the university. This book uncovers the rhetorical conventions that transcend dis- ciplinary boundaries, so that even freshmen, newcomers to the academy, are immediately able to join in the conversation.
The firm soon expanded its program beyond the Institute, publishing books by celebrated academics from America and abroad. In the s, 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. ISBN paperback 1. English language—Rhetoric—Handbooks, manuals, etc.
Persuasion Rhetoric —Handbooks, manuals, etc. Report writing—Handbooks, manuals, etc. Birkenstein, Cathy. G73 '. We are also delighted that while the audi- ence for our book in composition courses continues to grow, the book is increasingly being adopted in disciplines across the curriculum, confirming our view that the moves taught in the book are central to every academic discipline.
To that end, this edition adds a new chapter on writing about literature to the chapters already in the Second Edition on writing in the sciences and social sciences. One of our premises here is that writing about literature, as about any subject, gains in urgency, motivation, and engage- ment when the writer responds to the work not in a vacuum, but in conversation with other readers and critics.
We found that when students read over their drafts with an eye for the rhetorical moves represented by the templates they were able to spot gaps in their argument, concessions they needed to make, disconnections among ideas, inadequate summaries, poorly integrated quotations, and other questions they needed to address when revising.
Have they incorporated the views of naysayers with their own? If not, our brief revision guidelines can help them do so. The new chapter includes a full essay written by a student, annotated to show how the student used all the rhetorical moves taught in this book.
Finally, this edition adds a new chapter on writing online exploring the debate about whether digital technologies improve or degrade the way we think and write, and whether they foster or impede the meeting of minds.
Updated monthly with current articles from across media, this blog provides a space where students and teachers can literally join the conversation. We hope this Third Edition will get us even closer to these goals, equipping students with the writing skills they need to enter the academic world and beyond.
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. 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 them clearly, and representing them in the form of templates.
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 conversations and debates that surround them. More spe- cifically, 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 such mystification can be overcome.
Many students, she found, could readily grasp what it meant to support a thesis with evidence, to entertain a counterargument, 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. 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. While some argue that , others contend that.
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. In our view, this template represents the deep, underlying structure, the internal DNA as it were, of all effective argument. I remember the day I became colored. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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. In many respects, our templates echo this classical rhetorical tradition of imitating established models.
As a result of my study,. Templates have even been used in the teaching of personal narrative. What I take away from my own experience with is. As a result, I conclude. Yes, we are aware of this first-person prohibition, but we think it has serious flaws. First, expressing ill-considered, subjective opinions is not necessarily the worst sin beginning writers can commit; it might be a starting point from which they can move on to more reasoned, less self-indulgent perspectives.
Subsequent chapters take up the arts of summarizing and quoting what these others have to say. Part 4 offers guidance for entering conversations in specific academic contexts, with chapters on entering class discussions, writing online, reading, and writing in literature courses, the sciences, and social sciences.
Finally, we provide five readings and an index of templates. We do not, for instance, cover logical principles of argument such as syllogisms, warrants, logical fallacies, or the differences between inductive and deductive reasoning. Such formulas give students an immediate sense of what it feels like to enter a public conversation in a way that studying abstract warrants and logical fallacies does not. This approach to writing therefore has an ethical dimension, since it asks writers not simply to keep proving and reasserting what they already believe but to stretch what they believe by putting it up against beliefs that differ, sometimes radically, from their own.
In an increasingly diverse, global society, this ability to engage with the ideas of others is especially crucial to democratic citizenship. The same applies to writing. Often without consciously real- izing it, accomplished writers routinely rely on a stock of estab- lished moves that are crucial for communicating sophisticated ideas. What makes writers masters of their trade is not only their ability to express interesting thoughts but their mastery of an inventory of basic moves that they probably picked up by reading a wide range of other accomplished writers.
Less experienced writers, by contrast, are often unfamiliar with these basic moves and unsure how to make them in their own writ- ing. This book is intended as a short, user-friendly guide to the basic moves of academic writing. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of this book is its presentation of many such templates, designed to help you successfully enter not only the world of academic thinking and writing, but also the wider worlds of civic discourse and work. Instead of focusing solely on abstract principles of writing, then, this book offers model templates that help you put those principles directly into practice.
Working with these templates can give you an immediate sense of how to engage in the kinds of critical thinking you are required to do at the college level and in the vocational and public spheres beyond. Some of these templates represent simple but crucial moves like those used to summarize some widely held belief.
Others are more complicated. On the other hand,. At the same time that she argues , she also implies. It is true, of course, that critical thinking and writing go deeper than any set of linguistic formulas, requiring that you question assumptions, develop strong claims, offer supporting reasons and evidence, consider opposing arguments, and so on.
But these deeper habits of thought cannot be put into practice unless you have a language for expressing them in clear, orga- nized ways. For us, the underlying structure of effective academic writing—and of responsible public discourse—resides not just in stating our own ideas but in listening closely to others around us, summarizing their views in a way that they will recognize, and responding with our own ideas in kind.
Broadly speaking, academic writ- ing is argumentative writing, and we believe that to argue well you need to do more than assert your own position. You need to enter a conversation, using what others say or might say as a launching pad or sounding board for your own views.
For this reason, one of the main pieces of advice in this book is to write the voices of others into your text. If you have been taught to write a traditional five-paragraph essay, for example, you have learned how to develop a thesis and support it with evidence. To make an impact as a writer, you need to do more than make statements that are logical, well supported, and consis- tent.
For it is what others are saying and thinking that motivates our writing and gives it a reason for being. One famous example is Martin Luther King Jr. The letter— which was written in , while King was in prison for leading a demonstration against racial injustice in Birmingham—is structured almost entirely around a framework of summary and response, in which King summarizes and then answers their criticisms.
In one typical passage, King writes as follows. You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham.
But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations.
Martin Luther King Jr. My daughter, who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the former World Trade Center, thinks we should fly the American flag out our window. Definitely not, I say: The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war. It can even be something an individual or a group might say—or a side of yourself, something you once believed but no longer do, or something you partly believe but also doubt.
While King and Pollitt both identify the views they are responding to, some authors do not explicitly state their views but instead allow the reader to infer them. I like to think I have a certain advantage as a teacher of literature because when I was growing up I disliked and feared books. This point may come as a shock to you if you have always had the impression that in order to succeed academically you need to play it safe and avoid controversy in your writing, making statements that nobody can possibly disagree with.
On the one hand, I agree that. On the other hand, I still insist that. On the one hand, some argue that. From this perspective,. On the other hand, however, others argue that. In sum, then, the issue is whether or. My own view is that. Though I concede that , I still maintain that. For example,. Although some might object that , I would reply that. The issue is important because. If you go back over this template, you will see that it helps you make a host of challenging moves each of which is taken up in forthcoming chapters in this book.
Again, none of us is born knowing these moves, especially when it comes to academic writing. Hence the need for this book. If you are like some of our students, your initial response to templates may be skepticism. At first, many of our students complain that using templates will take away their originality and creativity and make them all sound the same. We create our own. As for the belief that pre-established forms undermine creativity, we think it rests on a very limited vision of what creativity is all about.
In our view, the above template and the others in this book will actually help your writing become more original and creative, not less. After all, even the most creative forms of expression depend on established patterns and structures. Ultimately, then, creativity and originality lie not in the avoidance of established forms but in the imaginative use of them. Furthermore, these templates do not dictate the content of what you say, which can be as original as you can make it, but only suggest a way of formatting how you say it.
In addition, once you begin to feel comfortable with the templates in this book, you will be able to improvise creatively on them to fit new situations and purposes and find others in your reading.
In other words, the templates offered here are learning tools to get you started, not structures set in stone. Once you get used to using them, you can even dispense with them altogether, for the rhetorical moves they model will be at your fingertips in an unconscious, instinctive way.
Whatever happened to personal responsibility? I tend to sympathize with these portly fast-food patrons, though. It is plagiarism, however, if the words used to fill in the blanks of such formulas are borrowed from others without proper acknowledgment.
Ultimately, this book invites you to become a critical thinker who can enter the types of conversations described eloquently by the philosopher Kenneth Burke in the following widely cited passage.
Likening the world of intellectual exchange to a never- ending conversation at a party, Burke writes: 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. 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.
The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. The central piece of advice in this book—that we listen carefully to others, including those who disagree with us, and then engage with them thoughtfully and respectfully—can help us see beyond our own pet beliefs, which may not be shared by everyone.
Exercises 1. Read the following paragraph from an essay by Emily Poe, a student at Furman University. Disregarding for the moment what Poe says, focus your attention on the phrases she uses to structure what she says italicized here. On the contrary, many of these supposedly brainwashed people are actu- ally independent thinkers, concerned citizens, and compassionate human beings.
For the truth is that there are many very good reasons for giving up meat. Write a short essay in which you first summarize our rationale for the templates in this book and then articulate your own position in response. If you want, you can use the template below to organize your paragraphs, expanding and modifying it as necessary to fit what you want to say. Specifically, Graff and Birkenstein argue that the types of writing templates they offer.
In sum, then, their view is that. In my view, the types of templates that the authors recommend. For instance,. In addition,. Some might object, of course, on the grounds that. Yet I would argue that. Overall, then, I believe —an important point to make given. X—had done very good work in a number of areas of the discipline.
The speaker proceeded to illustrate his thesis by referring extensively and in great detail to various books and articles by Dr. X and by quoting long pas- sages from them. The speaker was obviously both learned and impassioned, but as we listened to his talk we found ourselves somewhat puzzled: the argument—that Dr. Did anyone dispute it? Since the speaker gave no hint of an answer to any of these questions, we could only wonder why he was going on and on about X.
It The hypo- thetical was only after the speaker finished and took questions audience in from the audience that we got a clue: in response to the figure on p. This story illustrates an important lesson: that to give writ- ing the most important thing of all—namely, a point—a writer needs to indicate clearly not only what his or her thesis is, but also what larger conversation that thesis is responding to.
Because our speaker failed to mention what others had said about Dr. Perhaps the point was clear to other sociologists in the audience who were more familiar with the debates over Dr.
Delaying this explanation for more than one or two paragraphs in a very short essay or blog entry, three or four pages in a longer work, or more than ten or so pages in a book reverses the natural order in which readers process material—and in which writers think and develop ideas. After all, it seems very unlikely that our conference speaker first developed his defense of Dr.
X and only later came across Dr. As someone knowledgeable in his field, the speaker surely encountered the criticisms first and only then was compelled to respond and, as he saw it, set the record straight.
This is not to say that you must start with a detailed list of everyone who has written on your subject before you offer your own ideas. Had our conference speaker gone to the opposite extreme and spent most of his talk summarizing Dr. The point is to give your readers a quick preview of what is motivating your argument, not to drown them in details right away. Our civiliza- tion is decadent and our language—so the argument runs—must inevitably share in the general collapse.
Modern English. But I say we can. In opening this chapter, for example, we devote the first para- graph to an anecdote about the conference speaker and then move quickly at the start of the second paragraph to the miscon- ception about writing exemplified by the speaker.
In the follow- ing opening, from an opinion piece in the New York Times Book Review, Christina Nehring also moves quickly from an anecdote illustrating something she dislikes to her own claim—that book lovers think too highly of themselves. Instead, I mumbled something apologetic and melted into the crowd.
Here are some standard templates that we would have recommended to our conference speaker. These templates are popular because they provide a quick and efficient way to perform one of the most common moves that writers make: challenging widely accepted beliefs, placing them on the examining table, and analyzing their strengths and weaknesses.
These are templates that can help you think analytically—to look beyond what others say explicitly and to consider their unstated assumptions, as well as the implications of their views.
Furthermore, opening with a summary of a debate can help you explore the issue you are writing about before declar- ing your own view. In this way, you can use the writing process itself to help you discover where you stand instead of having to commit to a position before you are ready to do so. Here is a basic template for opening with a debate. On the one hand, argues.
On the other hand, contends. Others even maintain. My own view is. The cognitive scientist Mark Aronoff uses this kind of template in an essay on the workings of the human brain.
One, rationalism, sees the human mind as coming into this world more or less fully formed— preprogrammed, in modern terms. The other, empiricism, sees the mind of the newborn as largely unstructured, a blank slate. Whereas some are convinced that , others maintain that. The political writer Thomas Frank uses a variation on this move. That we are a nation divided is an almost universal lament of this bitter election year. However, the exact property that divides us—elemental though it is said to be—remains a matter of some controversy.
Their assertion that is contradicted by their claim that. We ourselves use such return sentences at every opportunity in this book to remind you of the view of writing that our book questions—that good writing means making true or smart or logical statements about a given subject with little or no refer- ence to what others say about it. The difference is huge.
Like the speaker in the cartoon on page 4 who declares that The Sopranos presents complex characters, these one-sided arguments fail to explain what view they are responding to—what view, in effect, they are trying to correct, add to, qualify, complicate, and so forth.
Your job in this exercise is to provide each argument with such a counterview. Feel free to use any of the templates in this chapter that you find helpful. Our experiments suggest that there are dangerous levels of chemical X in the Ohio groundwater. Material forces drive history. Male students often dominate class discussions. The film is about the problems of romantic relationships.
Use the template to structure a passage on a topic of your own choosing. Your first step here should be to find an idea that you support that others not only disagree with but actually find laughable or, as Zinczenko puts it, worthy of a Jay Leno monologue. You might write about one of the topics listed in the previous exercise the environment, gender relations, the meaning of a book or movie or any other topic that interests you.
If ever there was an idea custom-made for a Jay Leno monologue, this was it:. Whatever hap- pened to? I happen to sympathize with , though, perhaps because. Because writers who make strong claims need to map their claims relative to those of other people, it is important to know how to summarize effectively what those other people say. At the opposite extreme are those who do nothing but summarize. Generally speaking, a summary must at once be true to what the original author says while also emphasizing those aspects of what the author says that interest you, the writer.
Strik- ing this delicate balance can be tricky, since it means facing two ways at once: both outward toward the author being summarized and inward toward yourself. As a writer, when you play the believing game well, readers should not be able to tell whether you agree or disagree with the ideas you are summarizing. Consider the following summary. I disagree because these companies have to make money.
New York: W. Graff, Gerald and Cathy. Graff, Gerald. My Account. Log Out. Search for. Advanced Search. Logged In As. Find More. Online Collections. Need Help? YouTube Channel.
Birkenstein, Cathy. On Shelf. CMC Quigley Lib. Quick Copy View. G73 Place Hold. Add To List. Also in This Series. With its clear illustrations, the book is designed to be a self-study guide and to offer solutions to many struggling students in colleges and universities.
At the same time, the book can be helpful for lecturers to instruct their students how to write effective course assignments in their respective courses. The perfect companion for lighthouse buffs, and the most comprehensible and travel friendly field guide around, offers beautiful full-photographs, highly regarded directions and contact information, and complete articles on every existing lighthouse from way Down East Maine to cosmopolitan western Connecticut.
With contributions by 30 world experts, this resource examines methods for predicting radar range and explores radar subsystems such as receivers, transmitters, antennas, data processing, ECCM, and pulse compression. This radar handbook also explains the target cross section Reading the Reader Merav Roth.
The paradox is that the author is the actual writer of the letter that everyone is searching for. It is possible that there is in this a childlike quality or playful The opponent is either unnamed or, once named, the author's position is exposed and the opponent's must be undermined.
Since everyone is reading everyone else, it is immediately clear to all who have been included or excluded, Discussions of the author's style, vocabulary, and use of literary elements may take place with the entire class, since everyone is reading books by one specific author.
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