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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

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

demic club.” —Eileen Seifert, DePaul University

“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

“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 Rhode Island

“A beautifully lucid way to approach argument—different from

any rhetoric I’ve ever seen.”

—Anne-Marie Thomas, Austin Community College, Riverside

“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

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“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

“What effect has ‘They Say’ had on my students’ writing? 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.”

—Margaret Weaver, Missouri State University

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

liant, effective.”

—Perry Cumbie, Durham Technical Community College

“Loved by students, reasonable priced, manageable size, readable.”

—Roxanne Munch, Joliet Junior College

“This book explains in clear detail what skilled writers take for

granted.” —John Hyman, American 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

“A fabulous resource for my students (and for me). I like that

it’s small, and not overwhelming. It’s very practical, and really

demystifies the new kind of writing students have to figure out

as they transition to college.” —Sara Glennon, Landmark College

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THIRD EDITION

“THEY SAY I SAY”

The Moves That Matter

in Academic Writing

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THIRD EDITION

“THEY SAY I SAY”

The Moves That Matter

in Academic Writing

GERALD GRAFF

CATHY BIRKENSTEIN

both of the University of Illinois at Chicago

w.w.norton & company

new york | london

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For

Aaron David

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.

Printed in the United States of America

Third Edition

Composition: Cenveo® Publisher Services

Book design: Jo Anne Metsch

Production manager: Andrew Ensor

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Graff, Gerald.

“They say / I say” : the Moves that Matter in Academic Writing / Gerald Graff,

Cathy Birkenstein, Both of the University of Illinois at Chicago.—Third Edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-393-93584-4 (paperback)

1. English language—Rhetoric—Handbooks, manuals, etc. 2. Persuasion

(Rhetoric)—Handbooks, manuals, etc. 3. Report writing—Handbooks, manuals,

etc. I. Birkenstein, Cathy. II. Title.

PE1431.G73 2013

808'.042—dc23

2013039137

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

www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street,

London W1T 3QT

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

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vii

brief contents

preface to the third edition xiii

preface: Demystifying Academic Conversation xvi

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 42

PART 2. “I SAY”

4 “yes / no / okay, but”: Three Ways to Respond 55

5 “and yet”: Distinguishing What You Say from What They Say 68

6 “skeptics may object”: Planting a Naysayer in Your Text 78

7 “so what? who cares?”: Saying Why It Matters 92

PART 3. TYING IT ALL TOGETHER

8 “as a result”: Connecting the Parts 105

9 “a in’t so / is not”: Academic Writing Doesn’t Always

Mean Setting Aside Your Own Voice 121

10 “but don’t get me wrong”: The Art of Metacommentary 129

11 “he says contends”: Using the Templates to Revise 139

PART 4. IN SPECIFIC ACADEMIC CONTEXTS

12 “i take your point”: Entering Class Discussions 163

13 “imho”: Is Digital Communication Good or Bad—or Both? 167

14 “what’s motivating this writer?”:

Reading for the Conversation 173

15 “on closer examination”: Entering Conversations

about Literature 184

16 “the data suggest”: Writing in the Sciences 202

17 “analyze this”: Writing in the Social Sciences 221

readings 239

index of templates 293

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contents

preface to the third edition xiii

preface xvi

Demystifying Academic Conversation

introduction 1

Entering the Conversation

PART 1. “THEY SAY” 17

one “they say” 19

Starting with What Others Are Saying

two “her point is” 30

The Art of Summarizing

three “as he himself puts it” 42

The Art of Quoting

PART 2. “I SAY” 53

four “yes / no / okay, but” 55

Three Ways to Respond

five “and yet” 68

Distinguishing What You Say from What They Say

six “skeptics may object” 78

Planting a Naysayer in Your Text

seven “so what? who cares?” 92

Saying Why It Matters

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PART 3. TYING IT ALL TOGETHER 103

eight “as a result” 105

Connecting the Parts

nine “ain’t so / is not” 121

Academic Writing Doesn’t Always Mean

Setting Aside Your Own Voice

ten “but don’t get me wrong” 129

The Art of Metacommentary

eleven “he says contends” 139

Using the Templates to Revise

PART 4. IN SPECIFIC ACADEMIC

CONTEXTS 161

twelve “i take your point” 163

Entering Class Discussions

thirteen “imho” 167

Is Digital Communication Good or Bad—or Both?

fourteen “what’s motivating this

writer?” 173

Reading for the Conversation

fifteen “on closer examination” 184

Entering Conversations about Literature

sixteen “the data suggest” 202

Writing in the Sciences

seventeen “analyze this” 221

Writing in the Social Sciences

Contents

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Contents

readings 239

Don’t Blame the Eater 241

David Zinczenko

Hidden Intellectualism 244

Gerald Graff

Nuclear Waste 252

Richard A. Muller

The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream 260

Barbara Ehrenreich

Everything That Rises Must Converge 272

Flannery O’Connor

index of templates 293

credits 311

acknowledgments 313

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preface

to the third edition

We continue to be thrilled by the reception of our

book, which has now sold over a million copies and is assigned

in more than 1,500 (over half) the colleges and universities in

the United States. 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.

At the same time, we continue to adapt our approach to

the specific ways the “they say / I say” moves are deployed

in different disciplines. 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. In this new chapter, “Entering Conversations about

Literature,” we suggest ways in which students and teachers

can move beyond the type of essay that analyzes literary works

in isolation from the conversations and debates about those

works. 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 believe that

engaging with other readers, far from distracting attention from

the literary text itself, should help bring that text into sharper

xiii

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focus. Another premise is that the class discussions that are a

daily feature of literature courses can be a rich and provocative

source of “they says” that student writers can respond to in

generating their own interpretations. Throughout the chapter

are numerous templates that provide writers with language for

entering into conversations and debates with these “they says”:

published critics, classmates and teachers, their own previous

interpretations, and the authors of literary works themselves.

This new edition also includes a chapter on “Using the

Templates to Revise,” which grew out of our own teaching

experience, where we found that the templates in this book had

the unexpected benefit of helping students when they revise.

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. And given the

importance of online communication, we’re pleased that our

book now has its own blog, theysayiblog. Updated monthly

with current articles from across media, this blog provides

a space where students and teachers can literally join the

conversation.

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

xiv

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Even as we have revised and added to “They Say / I Say,” our

basic goals remain unchanged: to demystify academic writing

and reading by identifying the key moves of persuasive argu-

ment and representing those moves in forms that students can

put into practice. 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.

Preface to the Third Edition

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xvi

preface

Demystifying Academic Conversation

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

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

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Demystifying Academic Conversation

xvii

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.

• Shows that reading is a way of entering a conversation—not just

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 inter-

est 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 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. Second,

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PREFACE

xviii

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 .

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Demystifying Academic Conversation

xix

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.

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PREFACE

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.

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Demystifying Academic Conversation

xxi

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.

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PREFACE

xxii

okay, 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

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Demystifying Academic Conversation

xxiii

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 . As a result of my study,

.” That these two examples are geared toward post-

doctoral fellows and veteran researchers shows that it is not

only struggling undergraduates who can use help making these

key rhetorical moves, but experienced academics as well.

Templates have even been used in the teaching of personal

narrative. The literary and educational theorist Jane Tompkins

devised the following template to help student writers make the

often difficult move from telling a story to explaining what it

means: “X tells a story about to make the point that

. My own experience with yields a point

that is similar/different/both similar and different. What I take

away from my own experience with is . As

a result, I conclude .” We especially like this template

because it suggests that “they say / I say” argument need not be

mechanical, impersonal, or dry, and that telling a story and mak-

ing an argument are more compatible activities than many think.

why it’s okay to use “i”

But wait—doesn’t the “I” part of “they say / I say” flagrantly

encourage the use of the first-person pronoun? Aren’t we aware

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PREFACE

xxiv

that some teachers prohibit students from using “I” or “we,”

on the grounds that these pronouns encourage ill-considered,

subjective opinions rather than objective and reasoned argu-

ments? 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.

Second, prohibiting students from using “I” is simply not an

effective way of curbing students’ subjectivity, since one can

offer poorly argued, ill-supported opinions just as easily without

it. Third and most important, prohibiting the first person tends

to hamper students’ ability not only to take strong positions but

to differentiate their own positions from those of others, as we

point out in Chapter 5. To be sure, writers can resort to vari-

ous circumlocutions—“it will here be argued,” “the evidence

suggests,” “the truth is”—and these may be useful for avoid-

ing a monotonous series of “I believe” sentences. But except

for avoiding such monotony, we see no good reason why “I”

should be set aside in persuasive writing. Rather than prohibit

“I,” then, we think a better tactic is to give students practice

at using it well and learning its use, both by supporting their

claims with evidence and by attending closely to alternative

perspectives—to what “they” are saying.

how this book is organized

Because of its centrality, we have allowed the “they say / I say”

format to dictate the structure of this book. So while Part 1

addresses the art of listening to others, Part 2 addresses how

to offer one’s own response. Part 1 opens with a chapter on

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Demystifying Academic Conversation

xxv

“Starting with What Others Are Saying” that explains why it is

generally advisable to begin a text by citing others rather than

plunging directly into one’s own views. Subsequent chapters

take up the arts of summarizing and quoting what these others

have to say. Part 2 begins with a chapter on different ways of

responding, followed by chapters on marking the shift between

what “they say” and what “I say,” on introducing and answering

objections, and on answering the all-important questions: “so

what?” and “who cares?” Part 3 offers strategies for “Tying It All

Together,” beginning with a chapter on connection and coher-

ence; followed by a chapter on formal and informal language,

arguing that academic discourse is often perfectly compatible

with the informal language that students use outside school;

and concluding with a chapter on the art of metacommentary,

showing students how to guide the way readers understand a

text. 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.

what this book doesn’t do

There are some things that this book does not try to do. We do

not, for instance, cover logical principles of argument such as

syllogisms, warrants, logical fallacies, or the differences between

inductive and deductive reasoning. Although such concepts

can be useful, we believe most of us learn the ins and outs of

argumentative writing not by studying logical principles in the

abstract, but by plunging into actual discussions and debates,

trying out different patterns of response, and in this way getting

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PREFACE

xxvi

a sense of what works to persuade different audiences and what

doesn’t. In our view, people learn more about arguing from

hearing someone say, “You miss my point. What I’m saying

is not , but ,” or “I agree with you that

, and would even add that ,” than they do

from studying 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.

engaging with the ideas of others

One central goal of this book is to demystify academic writing

by returning it to its social and conversational roots. Although

writing may require some degree of quiet and solitude, the “they

say / I say” model shows students that they can best develop

their arguments not just by looking inward but by doing what

they often do in a good conversation with friends and family—

by listening carefully to what others are saying and engaging

with other views.

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.

Gerald Graff

Cathy Birkenstein

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THIRD EDITION

“THEY SAY I SAY”

The Moves That Matter

in Academic Writing

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introduction

Entering the Conversation

Think about an activity that you do particularly well:

cooking, playing the piano, shooting a basketball, even some-

thing as basic as driving a car. If you reflect on this activity, you’ll

realize that once you mastered it you no longer had to give much

conscious thought to the various moves that go into doing it.

Performing this activity, in other words, depends on your having

learned a series of complicated moves—moves that may seem

mysterious or difficult to those who haven’t yet learned them.

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.

One of our key premises is that these basic moves are so

common that they can be represented in templates that you

can use right away to structure and even generate your own

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INTRODUCTION

writing. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of this book is

its pre sentation 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.

j Many Americans assume that .

Others are more complicated.

j On the one hand, . On the other hand, .

j Author X contradicts herself. At the same time that she argues

, she also implies .

j I agree that .

j This is not to say that .

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.

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Entering the Conversation

state your own ideas as a

response to others

The single most important template that we focus on in this

book is the “they say ; I say ” formula that

gives our book its title. If there is any one point that we hope

you will take away from this book, it is the importance not only

of expressing your ideas (“I say”) but of presenting those ideas

as a response to some other person or group (“they say”). 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.

In our view, then, the best academic writing has one under-

lying feature: it is deeply engaged in some way with other peo-

ple’s views. Too often, however, academic writing is taught as

a process of saying “true” or “smart” things in a vacuum, as if

it were possible to argue effectively without being in conver-

sation with someone else. 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. This is

good advice as far as it goes, but it leaves out the important

fact that in the real world we don’t make arguments without

being provoked. Instead, we make arguments because some-

one has said or done something (or perhaps not said or done

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INTRODUCTION

something) and we need to respond: “I can’t see why you like

the Lakers so much”; “I agree: it was a great film”; “That argu-

ment is contradictory.” If it weren’t for other people and our

need to challenge, agree with, or otherwise respond to them,

there would be no reason to argue at all.

To make an impact as a writer, you need to do more than

make statements that are logical, well supported, and consis-

tent. You must also find a way of entering a conversation with

others’ views—with something “they say.” If your own argu-

ment doesn’t identify the “they say” that you’re responding

to, it probably won’t make sense. As the figure above suggests,

what you are saying may be clear to your audience, but why

you are saying it won’t be. For it is what others are saying and

thinking that motivates our writing and gives it a reason for

being. It follows, then, as the figure on the next page suggests,

that your own argument—the thesis or “I say” moment of your

text—should always be a response to the arguments of others.

Many writers make explicit “they say / I say” moves in their

writing. One famous example is Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter

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Entering the Conversation

from Birmingham Jail,” which consists almost entirely of King’s

eloquent responses to a public statement by eight clergy-men

deploring the civil rights protests he was leading. The letter—

which was written in 1963, 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., “Letter from Birmingham Jail”

King goes on to agree with his critics that “It is unfortunate that

demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham,” yet he hastens

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INTRODUCTION

to add that “it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white

power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.”

King’s letter is so thoroughly conversational, in fact, that it

could be rewritten in the form of a dialogue or play.

King’s critics:

King’s response:

Critics:

Response:

Clearly, King would not have written his famous letter were

it not for his critics, whose views he treats not as objections

to his already-formed arguments but as the motivating source

of those arguments, their central reason for being. He quotes

not only what his critics have said (“Some have asked: ‘Why

didn’t you give the new city administration time to act?’ ”), but

also things they might have said (“One may well ask: ‘How can

you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?’ ”)—all

to set the stage for what he himself wants to say.

A similar “they say / I say” exchange opens an essay about

American patriotism by the social critic Katha Pollitt, who uses

her own daughter’s comment to represent the national fervor

of post-9/11 patriotism.

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. She tells me I’m wrong—the

flag means standing together and honoring the dead and saying no

to terrorism. In a way we’re both right. . . .

Katha Pollitt, “Put Out No Flags”

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Entering the Conversation

As Pollitt’s example shows, the “they” you respond to in

crafting an argument need not be a famous author or someone

known to your audience. It can be a family member like

Pollitt’s daughter, or a friend or classmate who has made a

provocative claim. 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. The important thing is that the “they” (or

“you” or “she”) represent some wider group with which read-

ers might identify—in Pollitt’s case, those who patriotically

believe in flying the flag. Pollitt’s example also shows that

responding to the views of others need not always involve

unqualified opposition. By agreeing and disagreeing

with her daughter, Pollitt enacts what we call the “yes

and no” response, reconciling apparently incompatible

views.

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. See, for instance, if

you can identify the implied or unnamed “they say” that the

following claim is responding to.

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.

Gerald Graff, “Disliking Books at an Early Age”

In case you haven’t figured it out already, the phantom “they

say” here is the common belief that in order to be a good

teacher of literature, one must have grown up liking and enjoy-

ing books.

See Chapter

4 for more

on agreeing,

but with a

difference.

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INTRODUCTION

As you can see from these examples, many writers use the

“they say / I say” format to agree or disagree with others, to chal-

lenge standard ways of thinking, and thus to stir up controversy.

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. Though this

view of writing may appear logical, it is actually a recipe for flat,

lifeless writing and for writing that fails to answer what we call

the “so what?” and “who cares?” questions. “William Shakespeare

wrote many famous plays and sonnets” may be a perfectly true

statement, but precisely because nobody is likely to disagree with

it, it goes without saying and thus would seem pointless if said.

ways of responding

Just because much argumentative writing is driven by disagree-

ment, it does not follow that agreement is ruled out. Although

argumentation is often associated with conflict and opposition,

the type of conversational “they say / I say” argument that we

focus on in this book can be just as useful when you agree as

when you disagree.

j She argues , and I agree because .

j Her argument that is supported by new research

showing that .

Nor do you always have to choose between either simply agree-

ing or disagreeing, since the “they say / I say” format also works

to both agree and disagree at the same time, as Pollitt illustrates

above.

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Entering the Conversation

j He claims that , and I have mixed feelings about it.

On the one hand, I agree that . On the other hand,

I still insist that .

This last option—agreeing and disagreeing simultaneously—is

one we especially recommend, since it allows you to avoid a

simple yes or no response and present a more complicated argu-

ment, while containing that complication within a clear “on

the one hand / on the other hand” framework.

While the templates we offer in this book can be used to

structure your writing at the sentence level, they can also be

expanded as needed to almost any length, as the following

elaborated “they say / I say” template demonstrates.

j In recent discussions of , a controversial issue has

been whether . On the one hand, some argue

that . From this perspective, . On the other

hand, however, others argue that . In the words of

, one of this view’s main proponents, “ .”

According to this view, . 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). First, the template helps

you open your text by identifying an issue in some ongoing

conversation or debate (“In recent discussions of ,

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INTRODUCTION

a controversial issue has been ”), and then to map

some of the voices in this controversy (by using the “on the

one hand / on the other hand” structure). The template also

helps you introduce a quotation (“In the words of ”), to explain

the quotation in your own words (“According to this view”),

and—in a new paragraph—to state your own argument (“My

own view is that”), to qualify your argument (“Though I con-

cede that”), and then to support your argument with evidence

(“For example”). In addition, the template helps you make one

of the most crucial moves in argumentative writing, what we

call “planting a naysayer in your text,” in which you summarize

and then answer a likely objection to your own central claim

(“Although it might be objected that , I reply ”).

Finally, this template helps you shift between general, over-

arching claims (“In sum, then”) and smaller-scale, supporting

claims (“For example”).

Again, none of us is born knowing these moves, especially

when it comes to academic writing. Hence the need for this book.

do templates stifle creativity?

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. “They’ll turn

us into writing robots,” one of our students insisted. Another

agreed, adding, “Hey, I’m a jazz musician. And we don’t play by

set forms. We create our own.” “I’m in college now,” another

student asserted; “this is third-grade-level stuff.”

In our view, however, the templates in this book, far from

being “third-grade-level stuff,” represent the stock in trade of

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Entering the Conversation

sophisticated thinking and writing, and they often require a

great deal of practice and instruction to use successfully. 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.

Most songwriters, for instance, rely on a time-honored verse-

chorus-verse pattern, and few people would call Shakespeare

uncreative because he didn’t invent the sonnet or the dramatic

forms that he used to such dazzling effect. Even the most avant-

garde, cutting-edge artists (like improvisational jazz musicians)

need to master the basic forms that their work improvises on,

departs from, and goes beyond, or else their work will come

across as uneducated child’s play. 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.

But if you still need proof that writing templates do not stifle

creativity, consider the following opening to an essay on the

fast-food industry that we’ve included at the back of this book.

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INTRODUCTION

If ever there were a newspaper headline custom-made for Jay Leno’s

monologue, this was it. Kids taking on McDonald’s this week, suing

the company for making them fat. Isn’t that like middle-aged men

suing Porsche for making them get speeding tickets? Whatever

happened to personal responsibility?

I tend to sympathize with these portly fast-food patrons, though.

Maybe that’s because I used to be one of them.

David Zinczenko, “Don’t Blame the Eater”

Although Zinczenko relies on a version of the “they say / I

say” formula, his writing is anything but dry, robotic, or uncre-

ative. While Zinczenko does not explicitly use the words

“they say” and “I say,” the template still gives the passage its

underlying structure: “They say that kids suing fast-food com-

panies for making them fat is a joke; but I say such lawsuits

are justified.”

but isn’t this plagiarism?

“But isn’t this plagiarism?” at least one student each year will

usually ask. “Well, is it?” we respond, turning the question

around into one the entire class can profit from. “We are, after

all, asking you to use language in your writing that isn’t your

own—language that you ‘borrow’ or, to put it less delicately,

steal from other writers.”

Often, a lively discussion ensues that raises important

questions about authorial ownership and helps everyone

better understand the frequently confusing line between pla-

giarism and the legitimate use of what others say and how

they say it. Students are quick to see that no one person

owns a conventional formula like “on the one hand . . . on

the other hand . . . ” Phrases like “a controversial issue”

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Entering the Conversation

are so commonly used and recycled that they are generic—

community property that can be freely used without fear of

committing plagiarism. It is plagiarism, however, if the words

used to fill in the blanks of such formulas are borrowed from

others without proper acknowledgment. In sum, then, while

it is not plagiarism to recycle conventionally used formulas, it

is a serious academic offense to take the substantive content

from others’ texts without citing the author and giving him

or her proper credit.

putting in your oar

Though the immediate goal of this book is to help you become a

better writer, at a deeper level it invites you to become a certain

type of person: a critical, intellectual thinker who, instead of sit-

ting passively on the sidelines, can participate in the debates and

conversations of your world in an active and empowered way.

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.

Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form

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INTRODUCTION

What we like about this passage is its suggestion that stating

an 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.

This ability to enter complex, many-sided conversations has

taken on a special urgency in today’s diverse, post-9/11 world,

where the future for all of us may depend on our ability to put

ourselves in the shoes of those who think very differently from

us. 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. The mere act of crafting a sentence that

begins “Of course, someone might object that ” may

not seem like a way to change the world; but it does have the

potential to jog us out of our comfort zones, to get us thinking

critically about our own beliefs, and perhaps even to change

our minds.

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). Then write a new

paragraph using Poe’s as a model but replacing her topic,

vegetarianism, with one of your own.

The term “vegetarian” tends to be synonymous with “tree-hugger”

in many people’s minds. They see vegetarianism as a cult that

brainwashes its followers into eliminating an essential part of their

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Entering the Conversation

daily diets for an abstract goal of “animal welfare.” However, few

vegetarians choose their lifestyle just to follow the crowd. 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. Perhaps the best reasons are to improve the

environment, to encourage humane treatment of livestock, or to

enhance one’s own health. In this essay, then, closely examining a

vegetarian diet as compared to a meat-eater’s diet will show that

vegetarianism is clearly the better option for sustaining the Earth

and all its inhabitants.

2. 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.

In the Introduction to “They Say / I Say”: The Moves That Matter in

Academic Writing, Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein provide tem-

plates designed to . Specifically, Graff and Birkenstein

argue that the types of writing templates they offer . As

the authors themselves put it, “ .” Although some people

believe , Graff and Birkenstein insist that .

In sum, then, their view is that .

I [agree/disagree/have mixed feelings]. 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 .

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“THEY SAY”

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ONE

“they say”

Starting with What Others Are Saying

Not long ago we attended a talk at an academic conference

where the speaker’s central claim seemed to be that a certain

sociologist—call him Dr. 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. X’s work was very

important—was clear enough, but why did the speaker need to

make it in the first place? Did anyone dispute it? Were there

commentators in the field who had argued against X’s work or

challenged its value? Was the speaker’s interpretation of what

X had done somehow novel or revolutionary? 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

was only after the speaker finished and took questions

from the audience that we got a clue: in response to

one questioner, he referred to several critics who had

The hypo-

thetical

audience in

the figure on

p. 4 reacts

similarly.

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o n e one “THEY SAY”

vigorously questioned Dr. X’s ideas and convinced many soci-

ologists that Dr. X’s work was unsound.

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. X’s work, he left his audience unsure about why he felt the

need to say what he was saying. Perhaps the point was clear to

other sociologists in the audience who were more familiar with

the debates over Dr. X’s work than we were. But even they, we

bet, would have understood the speaker’s point better if he’d

sketched in some of the larger conversation his own claims were

a part of and reminded the audience about what “they say.”

This story also illustrates an important lesson about the order

in which things are said: to keep an audience engaged, a writer

needs to explain what he or she is responding to—either before

offering that response or, at least, very early in the discussion.

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. X’s critics. 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.

Therefore, when it comes to constructing an argument

(whether orally or in writing), we offer you the following

advice: remember that you are entering a conversation and

therefore need to start with “what others are saying,” as the

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Starting with What Others Are Saying

title of this chapter recommends, and then introduce your own

ideas as a response. Specifically, we suggest that you summarize

what “they say” as soon as you can in your text, and remind

readers of it at strategic points as your text unfolds. Though

it’s true that not all texts follow this practice, we think it’s

important for all writers to master it before they depart from it.

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. X’s critics

with no hint of what he himself had to say, the audience probably

would have had the same frustrated “why-is-he-going-on-like-

this?” reaction. What we suggest, then, is that as soon as possible

you state your own position and the one it’s responding to together,

and that you think of the two as a unit. It is generally best to

summarize the ideas you’re responding to briefly, at the start of

your text, and to delay detailed elaboration until later. The point

is to give your readers a quick preview of what is motivating your

argument, not to drown them in details right away.

Starting with a summary of others’ views may seem to con-

tradict the common advice that writers should lead with their

own thesis or claim. Although we agree that you shouldn’t keep

readers in suspense too long about your central argument, we also

believe that you need to present that argument as part of some

larger conversation, indicating something about the arguments

of others that you are supporting, opposing, amending, compli-

cating, or qualifying. One added benefit of summarizing others’

views as soon as you can: you let those others do some of the

work of framing and clarifying the issue you’re writing about.

Consider, for example, how George Orwell starts his famous

essay “Politics and the English Language” with what others are

saying.

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o n e one “THEY SAY”

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the

English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that

we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civiliza-

tion is decadent and our language—so the argument runs—must

inevitably share in the general collapse. . . .

[But] the process is reversible. Modern English . . . is full of

bad habits . . . which can be avoided if one is willing to take the

necessary trouble.

George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”

Orwell is basically saying, “Most people assume that we cannot

do anything about the bad state of the English language. But

I say we can.”

Of course, there are many other powerful ways to begin.

Instead of opening with someone else’s views, you could start

with an illustrative quotation, a revealing fact or statistic, or—

as we do in this chapter—a relevant anecdote. If you choose

one of these formats, however, be sure that it in some way

illustrates the view you’re addressing or leads you to that view

directly, with a minimum of steps.

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.

“I’m a reader!” announced the yellow button. “How about you?” I

looked at its bearer, a strapping young guy stalking my town’s Festival

of Books. “I’ll bet you’re a reader,” he volunteered, as though we were

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Starting with What Others Are Saying

two geniuses well met. “No,” I replied. “Absolutely not,” I wanted to

yell, and fling my Barnes & Noble bag at his feet. Instead, I mumbled

something apologetic and melted into the crowd.

There’s a new piety in the air: the self congratulation of book

lovers.

Christina Nehring, “Books Make You a Boring Person”

Nehring’s anecdote is really a kind of “they say”: book lovers

keep telling themselves how great they are.

templates for introducing

what “they say”

There are lots of conventional ways to introduce what others

are saying. Here are some standard templates that we would

have recommended to our conference speaker.

j A number of sociologists have recently suggested that X’s work

has several fundamental problems.

j It has become common today to dismiss .

j In their recent work, Y and Z have offered harsh critiques of

for .

templates for introducing

“standard views”

The following templates can help you make what we call the

“standard view” move, in which you introduce a view that has

become so widely accepted that by now it is essentially the

conventional way of thinking about a topic.

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o n e one “THEY SAY”

j Americans have always believed that individual effort can

triumph over circumstances.

j Conventional wisdom has it that .

j Common sense seems to dictate that .

j The standard way of thinking about topic X has it that .

j It is often said that .

j My whole life I have heard it said that .

j You would think that .

j Many people assume that .

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.

templates for making what “they say”

something you say

Another way to introduce the views you’re responding to is

to present them as your own. That is, the “they say” that you

respond to need not be a view held by others; it can be one that

you yourself once held or one that you are ambivalent about.

j I’ve always believed that museums are boring.

j When I was a child, I used to think that .

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Starting with What Others Are Saying

j Although I should know better by now, I cannot help thinking

that .

j At the same time that I believe , I also believe

templates for introducing

something implied or assumed

Another sophisticated move a writer can make is to summarize

a point that is not directly stated in what “they say” but is

implied or assumed.

j Although none of them have ever said so directly, my teachers

have often given me the impression that education will open doors.

j One implication of X’s treatment of is that .

j Although X does not say so directly, she apparently assumes

that .

j While they rarely admit as much, often take for

granted that .

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.

templates for introducing

an ongoing debate

Sometimes you’ll want to open by summarizing a debate

that presents two or more views. This kind of opening

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o n e one “THEY SAY”

demonstrates your awareness that there are conflicting ways

to look at your subject, the clear mark of someone who knows

the subject and therefore is likely to be a reliable, trustworthy

guide. 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.

j In discussions of X, one controversial issue has been .

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.

Theories of how the mind/brain works have been dominated

for centuries by two opposing views. 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.

Mark Aronoff, “Washington Sleeped Here”

Another way to open with a debate involves starting with a

proposition many people agree with in order to highlight the

point(s) on which they ultimately disagree.

j When it comes to the topic of , most of us will read-

ily agree that . Where this agreement usually ends,

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Starting with What Others Are Saying

however, is on the question of . 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.

Thomas Frank, “American Psyche”

keep what “they say” in view

We can’t urge you too strongly to keep in mind what “they say”

as you move through the rest of your text. After summarizing

the ideas you are responding to at the outset, it’s very impor-

tant to continue to keep those ideas in view. Readers won’t be

able to follow your unfolding response, much less any compli-

cations you may offer, unless you keep reminding them what

claims you are responding to.

In other words, even when presenting your own claims,

you should keep returning to the motivating “they say.”

The longer and more complicated your text, the greater the

chance that readers will forget what ideas originally moti-

vated it—no matter how clearly you lay them out at the

beginning. At strategic moments throughout your text, we

recommend that you include what we call “return sentences.”

Here is an example.

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o n e one “THEY SAY”

j In conclusion, then, as I suggested earlier, defenders of

can’t have it both ways. 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.

By reminding readers of the ideas you’re responding to,

return sentences ensure that your text maintains a sense of

mission and urgency from start to finish. In short, they help

ensure that your argument is a genuine response to others’ views

rather than just a set of observations about a given subject. The

difference is huge. To be responsive to others and the conver-

sation you’re entering, you need to start with what others are

saying and continue keeping it in the reader’s view.

Exercises

1. The following is a list of arguments that lack a “they say”—

any sense of who needs to hear these claims, who might

think otherwise. 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.

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Starting with What Others Are Saying

a. Our experiments suggest that there are dangerous levels

of chemical X in the Ohio groundwater.

b. Material forces drive history.

c. Proponents of Freudian psychology question standard

notions of “rationality.”

d. Male students often dominate class discussions.

e. The film is about the problems of romantic relationships.

f. I’m afraid that templates like the ones in this book will

stifle my creativity.

2. Below is a template that we derived from the opening of

David Zinczenko’s “Don’t Blame the Eater” (p. 241). 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: . Isn’t that like ? Whatever hap-

pened to ?

I happen to sympathize with , though, perhaps

because .

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TWO

“her point is”

The Art of Summarizing

If it is true, as we claim in this book, that to argue

persuasively you need to be in dialogue with others, then sum-

marizing others’ arguments is central to your arsenal of basic

moves. 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. (We’re using the word “summarizing” here to refer to any

information from others that you present in your own words,

including that which you paraphrase.)

Many writers shy away from summarizing—perhaps because

they don’t want to take the trouble to go back to the text in

question and wrestle with what it says, or because they fear that

devoting too much time to other people’s ideas will take away

from their own. When assigned to write a response to an article,

such writers might offer their own views on the article’s topic

while hardly mentioning what the article itself argues or says. At

the opposite extreme are those who do nothing but summarize.

Lacking confidence, perhaps, in their own ideas, these writers so

overload their texts with summaries of others’ ideas that their

own voice gets lost. And since these summaries are not animated

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The Art of Summarizing

by the writers’ own interests, they often read like mere lists of

things that X thinks or Y says—with no clear focus.

As a general rule, a good summary requires balancing what

the original author is saying with the writer’s own focus.

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). Ultimately, it

means being respectful of others but simultaneously struc-

turing how you summarize them in light of your own text’s

central argument.

on the one hand,

put yourself in their shoes

To write a really good summary, you must be able to suspend your

own beliefs for a time and put yourself in the shoes of someone

else. This means playing what the writing theorist Peter Elbow

calls the “believing game,” in which you try to inhabit the world-

view of those whose conversation you are joining—and whom you

are perhaps even disagreeing with—and try to see their argument

from their perspective. This ability to temporarily suspend one’s

own convictions is a hallmark of good actors, who must convinc-

ingly “become” characters whom in real life they may detest. 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.

If, as a writer, you cannot or will not suspend your own

beliefs in this way, you are likely to produce summaries that are

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t w o two “HER POINT IS”

so obviously biased that they undermine your credibility with

readers. Consider the following summary.

David Zinczenko’s article, “Don’t Blame the Eater,” is nothing

more than an angry rant in which he accuses the fast-food com-

panies of an evil conspiracy to make people fat. I disagree because

these companies have to make money. . . .

If you review what Zinczenko actually says (pp. 241–43), you

should immediately see that this summary amounts to an unfair

distortion. While Zinczenko does argue that the practices of

the fast-food industry have the effect of making people fat, his

tone is never “angry,” and he never goes so far as to suggest

that the fast-food industry conspires to make people fat with

deliberately evil intent.

Another tell-tale sign of this writer’s failure to give

Zinczenko a fair hearing is the hasty way he abandons the sum-

mary after only one sentence and rushes on to his own response.

So eager is this writer to disagree that he not only caricatures

what Zinczenko says but also gives the article a hasty, super-

ficial reading. Granted, there are many writing situations in

which, because of matters of proportion, a one- or two-sentence

summary is precisely what you want. Indeed, as writing profes-

sor Karen Lunsford (whose own research focuses on argument

theory) points out, it is standard in the natural and social sci-

ences to summarize the work of others quickly, in one pithy

sentence or phrase, as in the following example.

Several studies (Crackle, 2012; Pop, 2007; Snap, 2006) suggest that

these policies are harmless; moreover, other studies (Dick, 2011;

Harry, 2007; Tom, 2005) argue that they even have benefits.

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The Art of Summarizing

But if your assignment is to respond in writing to a single author

like Zinczenko, you will need to tell your readers enough about

his or her argument so they can assess its merits on their own,

independent of you.

When a writer fails to provide enough summary or to engage

in a rigorous or serious enough summary, he or she often falls

prey to what we call “the closest cliché syndrome,” in which

what gets summarized is not the view the author in question has

actually expressed but a familiar cliché that the writer mistakes

for the author’s view (sometimes because the writer believes it

and mistakenly assumes the author must too). So, for example,

Martin Luther King Jr.’s passionate defense of civil disobedi-

ence in “Letter from Birmingham Jail” might be summarized

not as the defense of political protest that it actually is but as

a plea for everyone to “just get along.” Similarly, Zinczenko’s

critique of the fast-food industry might be summarized as a call

for overweight people to take responsibility for their weight.

Whenever you enter into a conversation with others in your

writing, then, it is extremely important that you go back to

what those others have said, that you study it very closely, and

that you not confuse it with something you already believe. A

writer who fails to do this ends up essentially conversing with

imaginary others who are really only the products of his or her

own biases and preconceptions.

on the other hand,

know where you are going

Even as writing an effective summary requires you to temporar-

ily adopt the worldview of another, it does not mean ignoring

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t w o two “HER POINT IS”

your own view altogether. Paradoxically, at the same time that

summarizing another text requires you to represent fairly what

it says, it also requires that your own response exert a quiet

influence. A good summary, in other words, has a focus or spin

that allows the summary to fit with your own agenda while still

being true to the text you are summarizing.

Thus if you are writing in response to the essay by Zinczenko,

you should be able to see that an essay on the fast-food industry

in general will call for a very different summary than will an

essay on parenting, corporate regulation, or warning labels. If

you want your essay to encompass all three topics, you’ll need

to subordinate these three issues to one of Zinczenko’s general

claims and then make sure this general claim directly sets up

your own argument.

For example, suppose you want to argue that it is parents, not

fast-food companies, who are to blame for children’s obesity.

To set up this argument, you will probably want to compose a

summary that highlights what Zinczenko says about the fast-

food industry and parents. Consider this sample.

In his article “Don’t Blame the Eater,” David Zinczenko blames

the fast-food industry for fueling today’s so-called obesity epidemic,

not only by failing to provide adequate warning labels on its

high-calorie foods but also by filling the nutritional void in chil-

dren’s lives left by their overtaxed working parents. With many

parents working long hours and unable to supervise what their

children eat, Zinczenko claims, children today are easily victimized

by the low-cost, calorie-laden foods that the fast-food chains are all

too eager to supply. When he was a young boy, for instance, and his

single mother was away at work, he ate at Taco Bell, McDonald’s,

and other chains on a regular basis, and ended up overweight.

Zinczenko’s hope is that with the new spate of lawsuits against

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The Art of Summarizing

the food industry, other children with working parents will have

healthier choices available to them, and that they will not, like

him, become obese.

In my view, however, it is the parents, and not the food chains,

who are responsible for their children’s obesity. While it is true

that many of today’s parents work long hours, there are still several

things that parents can do to guarantee that their children eat

healthy foods. . . .

The summary in the first paragraph succeeds because it points

in two directions at once—both toward Zinczenko’s own text

and toward the second paragraph, where the writer begins to

establish her own argument. The opening sentence gives a sense

of Zinczenko’s general argument (that the fast-food chains are

to blame for obesity), including his two main supporting claims

(about warning labels and parents), but it ends with an empha-

sis on the writer’s main concern: parental responsibility. In this

way, the summary does justice to Zinczenko’s arguments while

also setting up the ensuing critique.

This advice—to summarize authors in light of your own

arguments—may seem painfully obvious. But writers often

summarize a given author on one issue even though their text

actually focuses on another. To avoid this problem, you need to

make sure that your “they say” and “I say” are well matched. In

fact, aligning what they say with what you say is a good thing

to work on when revising what you’ve written.

Often writers who summarize without regard to their own

interests fall prey to what might be called “list summaries,”

summaries that simply inventory the original author’s various

points but fail to focus those points around any larger overall

claim. If you’ve ever heard a talk in which the points were con-

nected only by words like “and then,” “also,” and “in addition,”

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t w o two “HER POINT IS”

you know how such lists can put listeners to sleep—as shown

in the figure above. A typical list summary sounds like this.

The author says many different things about his subject. First he

says. . . . Then he makes the point that. . . . In addition he says. . . .

And then he writes. . . . Also he shows that. . . . And then he says. . . .

It may be boring list summaries like this that give summaries

in general a bad name and even prompt some instructors to

discourage their students from summarizing at all.

In conclusion, writing a good summary means not just repre-

senting an author’s view accurately, but doing so in a way that

fits your own composition’s larger agenda. On the one hand,

it means playing Peter Elbow’s believing game and doing jus-

tice to the source; if the summary ignores or misrepresents the

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The Art of Summarizing

source, its bias and unfairness will show. On the other hand,

even as it does justice to the source, a summary has to have a

slant or spin that prepares the way for your own claims. Once

a summary enters your text, you should think of it as joint

property—reflecting both the source you are summarizing and

your own views.

summarizing satirically

Thus far in this chapter we have argued that, as a general rule,

good summaries require a balance between what someone else

has said and your own interests as a writer. Now, however, we

want to address one exception to this rule: the satiric summary,

in which a writer deliberately gives his or her own spin to some-

one else’s argument in order to reveal a glaring shortcoming in

it. Despite our previous comments that well-crafted summaries

generally strike a balance between heeding what someone else

has said and your own independent interests, the satiric mode

can at times be a very effective form of critique because it lets

the summarized argument condemn itself without overt edito-

rializing by you, the writer. If you’ve ever watched The Daily

Show, you’ll recall that it often merely summarizes silly things

political leaders have said or done, letting their words or actions

undermine themselves.

Consider another example. In September 2001, then-

President George W. Bush in a speech to Congress urged

the nation’s “continued participation and confidence in the

American economy” as a means of recovering from the terror-

ist attacks of 9/11. The journalist Allan Sloan criticized this

proposal simply by summarizing it, observing that the president

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t w o two “HER POINT IS”

had equated “patriotism with shopping. Maxing out your credit

cards at the mall wasn’t self indulgence, it was a way to get back

at Osama bin Laden.” Sloan’s summary leaves no doubt where

he stands—he considers Bush’s proposal ridiculous, or at least

too simple.

use signal verbs that fit the action

In introducing summaries, try to avoid bland formulas like “she

says,” or “they believe.” Though language like this is sometimes

serviceable enough, it often fails to reflect accurately what’s been

said. In some cases, “he says” may even drain the passion out of

the ideas you’re summarizing.

We suspect that the habit of ignoring the action in what we

summarize stems from the mistaken belief we mentioned earlier

that writing is about playing it safe and not making waves, a

matter of piling up truths and bits of knowledge rather than

a dynamic process of doing things to and with other people.

People who wouldn’t hesitate to say “X totally misrepresented,”

“attacked,” or “loved” something when chatting with friends

will in their writing often opt for far tamer and even less accu-

rate phrases like “X said.”

But the authors you summarize at the college level seldom

simply “say” or “discuss” things; they “urge,” “emphasize,”

and “complain about” them. David Zinczenko, for example,

doesn’t just say that fast-food companies contribute to obesity;

he complains or protests that they do; he challenges, chastises,

and indicts those companies. The Declaration of Independence

doesn’t just talk about the treatment of the colonies by the

British; it protests against it. To do justice to the authors you cite,

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The Art of Summarizing

we recommend that when summarizing—or when introducing

a quotation—you use vivid and precise signal verbs as often as

possible. Though “he says” or “she believes” will sometimes be

the most appropriate language for the occasion, your text will

often be more accurate and lively if you tailor your verbs to

suit the precise actions you’re describing.

templates for introducing

summaries and quotations

j She advocates a radical revision of the juvenile justice system.

j They celebrate the fact that .

j , he admits.

verbs for introducing

summaries and quotations

verbs for making a claim

argue insist

assert observe

believe remind us

claim report

emphasize suggest

verbs for expressing agreement

acknowledge endorse

admire extol

agree praise

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t w o two “HER POINT IS”

verbs for expressing agreement

celebrate the fact that reaffirm

corroborate support

do not deny verify

verbs for questioning or disagreeing

complain qualify

complicate question

contend refute

contradict reject

deny renounce

deplore the tendency to repudiate

verbs for making recommendations

advocate implore

call for plead

demand recommend

encourage urge

exhort warn

Exercises

1. To get a feel for Peter Elbow’s “believing game,” write a sum-

mary of some belief that you strongly disagree with. Then

write a summary of the position that you actually hold on

this topic. Give both summaries to a classmate or two, and

see if they can tell which position you endorse. If you’ve

succeeded, they won’t be able to tell.

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The Art of Summarizing

2. Write two different summaries of David Zinczenko’s “Don’t

Blame the Eater” (pp. 241–43). Write the first one for an

essay arguing that, contrary to what Zinczenko claims, there

are inexpensive and convenient alternatives to fast-food

restaurants. Write the second for an essay that questions

whether being overweight is a genuine medical problem

rather than a problem of cultural stereotypes. Compare your

two summaries: though they are about the same article, they

should look very different.

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THREE

“as he himself puts it”

The Art of Quoting

A key premise of this book is that to launch an effective

argument you need to write the arguments of others into your

text. One of the best ways to do so is by not only summarizing

what “they say,” as suggested in Chapter 2, but by quoting their

exact words. Quoting someone else’s words gives a tremendous

amount of credibility to your summary and helps ensure that

it is fair and accurate. In a sense, then, quotations function as

a kind of proof of evidence, saying to readers: “Look, I’m not

just making this up. She makes this claim and here it is in her

exact words.”

Yet many writers make a host of mistakes when it comes to

quoting, not the least of which is the failure to quote enough

in the first place, if at all. Some writers quote too little—

perhaps because they don’t want to bother going back to

the original text and looking up the author’s exact words, or

because they think they can reconstruct the author’s ideas from

memory. At the opposite extreme are writers who so overquote

that they end up with texts that are short on commentary of

their own—maybe because they lack confidence in their abil-

ity to comment on the quotations, or because they don’t fully

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The Art of Quoting

understand what they’ve quoted and therefore have trouble

explaining what the quotations mean.

But the main problem with quoting arises when writers

assume that quotations speak for themselves. Because the

meaning of a quotation is obvious to them, many writers assume

that this meaning will also be obvious to their readers, when

often it is not. Writers who make this mistake think that their

job is done when they’ve chosen a quotation and inserted it

into their text. They draft an essay, slap in a few quotations,

and whammo, they’re done.

Such writers fail to see that quoting means more than sim-

ply enclosing what “they say” in quotation marks. In a way,

quotations are orphans: words that have been taken from their

original contexts and that need to be integrated into their new

textual surroundings. This chapter offers two key ways to pro-

duce this sort of integration: (1) by choosing quotations wisely,

with an eye to how well they support a particular part of your

text, and (2) by surrounding every major quotation with a frame

explaining whose words they are, what the quotation means,

and how the quotation relates to your own text. The point we

want to emphasize is that quoting what “they say” must always

be connected with what you say.

quote relevant passages

Before you can select appropriate quotations, you need to have

a sense of what you want to do with them—that is, how they

will support your text at the particular point where you insert

them. Be careful not to select quotations just for the sake of

demonstrating that you’ve read the author’s work; you need to

make sure they support your own argument.

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three three “AS HE HIMSELF PUTS IT”

However, finding relevant quotations is not always easy. In

fact, sometimes quotations that were initially relevant to your

argument, or to a key point in it, become less so as your text

changes during the process of writing and revising. Given the

evolving and messy nature of writing, you may sometimes think

that you’ve found the perfect quotation to support your argu-

ment, only to discover later on, as your text develops, that your

focus has changed and the quotation no longer works. It can be

somewhat misleading, then, to speak of finding your thesis and

finding relevant quotations as two separate steps, one coming

after the other. When you’re deeply engaged in the writing and

revising process, there is usually a great deal of back-and-forth

between your argument and any quotations you select.

frame every quotation

Finding relevant quotations is only part of your job; you also

need to present them in a way that makes their relevance and

meaning clear to your readers. Since quotations do not speak

for themselves, you need to build a frame around them in which

you do that speaking for them.

Quotations that are inserted into a text without such a

frame are sometimes called “dangling” quotations for the way

they’re left dangling without any explanation. One teacher

we’ve worked with, Steve Benton, calls these “hit-and-run”

quotations, likening them to car accidents in which the driver

speeds away and avoids taking responsibility for the dent in

your fender or the smashed taillights, as in the figure that

follows.

On the following page is a typical hit-and-run quotation

by a writer responding to an essay by the feminist philosopher

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The Art of Quoting

Susan Bordo, who laments that media pressures on young

women to diet are spreading to previously isolated regions of

the world like the Fiji islands.

Susan Bordo writes about women and dieting. “Fiji is just one

example. Until television was introduced in 1995, the islands had

no reported cases of eating disorders. In 1998, three years after

programs from the United States and Britain began broadcasting

there, 62 percent of the girls surveyed reported dieting.”

I think Bordo is right. Another point Bordo makes is that. . . .

Since this writer fails to introduce the quotation adequately or

explain why he finds it worth quoting, readers will have a hard

time reconstructing what Bordo argued. Besides neglecting to

say who Bordo is or even that the quoted words are hers, the

writer does not explain how her words connect with anything

he is saying or even what she says that he thinks is so “right.”

He simply abandons the quotation in his haste to zoom on to

another point.

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three three “AS HE HIMSELF PUTS IT”

To adequately frame a quotation, you need to insert it into

what we like to call a “quotation sandwich,” with the statement

introducing it serving as the top slice of bread and the explana-

tion following it serving as the bottom slice. The introductory

or lead-in claims should explain who is speaking and set up what

the quotation says; the follow-up statements should explain

why you consider the quotation to be important and what you

take it to say.

templates for introducing quotations

j X states, “not all steroids should be banned from sports.”

j As the prominent philosopher X puts it, “ .”

j According to X, “ .”

j X himself writes, “ .”

j In her book, , X maintains that “ .”

j Writing in the journal Commentary, X complains that “ .”

j In X’s view, “ .”

j X agrees when she writes, “ .”

j X disagrees when he writes, “ .”

j X complicates matters further when she writes, “ .”

templates for explaining quotations

The one piece of advice about quoting that our students say

they find most helpful is to get in the habit of following every

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The Art of Quoting

major quotation by explaining what it means, using a template

like one of the ones below.

j Basically, X is warning that the proposed solution will only make

the problem worse.

j In other words, X believes .

j In making this comment, X urges us to .

j X is corroborating the age-old adage that .

j X’s point is that .

j The essence of X’s argument is that .

When offering such explanations, it is important to use lan-

guage that accurately reflects the spirit of the quoted passage. It

is quite serviceable to write “Bordo states” or “asserts” in intro-

ducing the quotation about Fiji. But given the fact that Bordo

is clearly alarmed by the extension of the media’s

reach to Fiji, it is far more accurate to use language

that reflects her alarm: “Bordo is alarmed that” or “is

disturbed by” or “complains.”

Consider, for example, how the earlier passage on Bordo

might be revised using some of these moves.

The feminist philosopher Susan Bordo deplores Western media’s

obsession with female thinness and dieting. Her basic complaint is

that increasing numbers of women across the globe are being led to

see themselves as fat and in need of a diet. Citing the islands of Fiji

as a case in point, Bordo notes that “until television was introduced

in 1995, the islands had no reported cases of eating disorders. In

1998, three years after programs from the United States and Britain

See pp. 39–40

for a list of

action verbs for

summarizing

what others

say.

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three three “AS HE HIMSELF PUTS IT”

began broadcasting there, 62 percent of the girls surveyed reported

dieting” (149–50). Bordo’s point is that the Western cult of dieting

is spreading even to remote places across the globe. Ultimately,

Bordo complains, the culture of dieting will find you, regardless

of where you live.

Bordo’s observations ring true to me because, now that I think

about it, many women I know, regardless of where they are from,

worry about their weight. . . .

This framing of the quotation not only better integrates Bordo’s

words into the writer’s text, but also serves to demonstrate the

writer’s interpretation of what Bordo is saying. While “the femi-

nist philosopher” and “Bordo notes” provide information that

readers need to know, the sentences that follow the quotation

build a bridge between Bordo’s words and those of the writer.

The reference to 62 percent of Fijian girls dieting is no longer

an inert statistic (as it was in the flawed passage presented

earlier) but a quantitative example of how “the Western cult

of dieting is spreading . . . across the globe.” Just as impor-

tant, these sentences explain what Bordo is saying in the writ-

er’s own words—and thereby make clear that the quotation is

being used purposefully to set up the writer’s own argument

and has not been stuck in just for padding the essay or the

works-cited list.

blend the author’s words

with your own

The above framing material also works well because it accu-

rately represents Bordo’s words while giving those words the

writer’s own spin. Notice how the passage refers several times

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The Art of Quoting

to the key concept of dieting, and how it echoes Bordo’s refer-

ences to “television” and to U.S. and British “broadcasting” by

referring to “culture,” which is further specified as “Western.”

Instead of simply repeating Bordo word for word, the follow-up

sentences echo just enough of her language while still moving

the discussion in the writer’s own direction. In effect, the fram-

ing creates a kind of hybrid mix of Bordo’s words and those of

the writer.

can you overanalyze a quotation?

But is it possible to overexplain a quotation? And how do you

know when you’ve explained a quotation thoroughly enough?

After all, not all quotations require the same amount of explan-

atory framing, and there are no hard-and-fast rules for knowing

how much explanation any quotation needs. As a general rule,

the most explanatory framing is needed for quotations that may

be hard for readers to process: quotations that are long and

complex, that are filled with details or jargon, or that contain

hidden complexities.

And yet, though the particular situation usually dictates when

and how much to explain a quotation, we will still offer one piece

of advice: when in doubt, go for it. It is better to risk being overly

explicit about what you take a quotation to mean than to leave

the quotation dangling and your readers in doubt. Indeed, we

encourage you to provide such explanatory framing even when

writing to an audience that you know to be familiar with the

author being quoted and able to interpret your quotations on

their own. Even in such cases, readers need to see how you inter-

pret the quotation, since words—especially those of controversial

figures—can be interpreted in various ways and used to support

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three three “AS HE HIMSELF PUTS IT”

different, sometimes opposing, agendas. Your readers need to see

what you make of the material you’ve quoted, if only to be sure

that your reading of the material and theirs is on the same page.

how not to introduce quotations

We want to conclude this chapter by surveying some ways

not to introduce quotations. Although some writers do so,

you should not introduce quotations by saying something like

“Orwell asserts an idea that” or “A quote by Shakespeare says.”

Introductory phrases like these are both redundant and mislead-

ing. In the first example, you could write either “Orwell asserts

that” or “Orwell’s assertion is that,” rather than redundantly

combining the two. The second example misleads readers, since

it is the writer who is doing the quoting, not Shakespeare (as

“a quote by Shakespeare” implies).

The templates in this book will help you avoid such mis-

takes. Once you have mastered templates like “as X puts it,”

or “in X’s own words,” you probably won’t even have to think

about them—and will be free to focus on the challenging ideas

that templates help you frame.

Exercises

1. Find a published piece of writing that quotes something that

“they say.” How has the writer integrated the quotation into

his or her own text? How has he or she introduced the quota-

tion, and what, if anything, has the writer said to explain it

and tie it to his or her own text? Based on what you’ve read

in this chapter, are there any changes you would suggest?

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The Art of Quoting

2. Look at something you have written for one of your classes.

Have you quoted any sources? If so, how have you integrated

the quotation into your own text? How have you introduced

it? Explained what it means? Indicated how it relates to

your text? If you haven’t done all these things, revise your

text to do so, perhaps using the Templates for Introducing

Quotations (p. 46) and Explaining Quotations (pp. 46–47).

If you’ve not written anything with quotations, try revising

some academic text you’ve written to do so.

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“I SAY”

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FOUR

“yes / no / okay, but”

Three Ways to Respond

The first three chapters of this book discuss the “they

say” stage of writing, in which you devote your attention to the

views of some other person or group. In this chapter we move

to the “I say” stage, in which you offer your own argument as

a response to what “they” have said.

Moving to the “I say” stage can be daunting in academia,

where it often may seem that you need to be an expert in a field

to have an argument at all. Many students have told us that they

have trouble entering some of the high-powered conversations

that take place in college or graduate school because they do not

know enough about the topic at hand, or because, they say, they

simply are not “smart enough.” Yet often these same students,

when given a chance to study in depth the contribution that

some scholar has made in a given field, will turn around and

say things like “I can see where she is coming from, how she

makes her case by building on what other scholars have said.

Perhaps had I studied the situation longer I could have come up

with a similar argument.” What these students came to realize

is that good arguments are based not on knowledge that only

a special class of experts has access to, but on everyday habits

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four four “YES / NO / OKAY, BUT”

of mind that can be isolated, identified, and used by almost

anyone. Though there’s certainly no substitute for expertise

and for knowing as much as possible about one’s topic, the

arguments that finally win the day are built, as the title of this

chapter suggests, on some very basic rhetorical patterns that

most of us use on a daily basis.

There are a great many ways to respond to others’ ideas,

but this chapter concentrates on the three most common and

recognizable ways: agreeing, disagreeing, or some combination

of both. Although each way of responding is open to endless

variation, we focus on these three because readers come to any

text needing to learn fairly quickly where the writer stands, and

they do this by placing the writer on a mental map consisting

of a few familiar options: the writer agrees with those he or

she is responding to, disagrees with them, or presents some

combination of both agreeing and disagreeing.

When writers take too long to declare their position relative

to views they’ve summarized or quoted, readers get frustrated,

wondering, “Is this guy agreeing or disagreeing? Is he for what

this other person has said, against it, or what?” For this reason,

this chapter’s advice applies to reading as well as to writing.

Especially with difficult texts, you need not only to find the

position the writer is responding to—the “they say”—but also

to determine whether the writer is agreeing with it, challenging

it, or some mixture of the two.

only three ways to respond?

Perhaps you’ll worry that fitting your own response into one of

these three categories will force you to oversimplify your argu-

ment or lessen its complexity, subtlety, or originality. This is

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Three Ways to Respond

certainly a serious concern for academics who are rightly skepti-

cal of writing that is simplistic and reductive. We would argue,

however, that the more complex and subtle your argument is,

and the more it departs from the conventional ways people

think, the more your readers will need to be able to place it

on their mental map in order to process the complex details

you present. That is, the complexity, subtlety, and originality

of your response are more likely to stand out and be noticed

if readers have a baseline sense of where you stand relative to

any ideas you’ve cited. As you move through this chapter, we

hope you’ll agree that the forms of agreeing, disagreeing, and

both agreeing and disagreeing that we discuss, far from being

simplistic or one-dimensional, are able to accommodate a high

degree of creative, complex thought.

It is always a good tactic to begin your response not by

launching directly into a mass of details but by stating

clearly whether you agree, disagree, or both, using a direct,

no-nonsense formula such as: “I agree,” “I disagree,” or “I am

of two minds. I agree that , but I cannot agree

that .” Once you have offered one of these straight-

forward statements (or one of the many variations dis-

cussed below), readers will have a strong grasp of your

position and then be able to appreciate the complica-

tions you go on to offer as your response unfolds.

Still, you may object that these three basic ways of respond-

ing don’t cover all the options—that they ignore interpretive or

analytical responses, for example. In other words, you might think

that when you interpret a literary work you don’t necessarily agree

or disagree with anything but simply explain the work’s meaning,

style, or structure. Many essays about literature and the arts, it

might be said, take this form—they interpret a work’s meaning,

thus rendering matters of agreeing or disagreeing irrelevant.

See p. 21 for

suggestions

on previewing

where you

stand.

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four four “YES / NO / OKAY, BUT”

We would argue, however, that the most interesting inter-

pretations in fact tend to be those that agree, disagree, or

both—that instead of being offered solo, the best interpreta-

tions take strong stands relative to other interpretations. In fact,

there would be no reason to offer an interpretation of a work

of literature or art unless you were responding to the interpre-

tations or possible interpretations of others. Even when you

point out features or qualities of an artistic work that others

have not noticed, you are implicitly disagreeing with what

those interpreters have said by pointing out that they missed

or overlooked something that, in your view, is important. In

any effective interpretation, then, you need not only to state

what you yourself take the work of art to mean but to do so

relative to the interpretations of other readers—be they pro-

fessional scholars, teachers, classmates, or even hypothetical

readers (as in, “Although some readers might think that this

poem is about , it is in fact about ”).

disagree—and explain why

Disagreeing may seem like one of the simpler moves a writer

can make, and it is often the first thing people associate with

critical thinking. Disagreeing can also be the easiest way to

generate an essay: find something you can disagree with in what

has been said or might be said about your topic, summarize

it, and argue with it. But disagreement in fact poses hidden

challenges. You need to do more than simply assert that you

disagree with a particular view; you also have to offer persuasive

reasons why you disagree. After all, disagreeing means more

than adding “not” to what someone else has said, more than

just saying, “Although they say women’s rights are improving,

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Three Ways to Respond

I say women’s rights are not improving.” Such a response merely

contradicts the view it responds to and fails to add anything

interesting or new. To turn it into an argument, you need to

give reasons to support what you say: because another’s argu-

ment fails to take relevant factors into account; because it is

based on faulty or incomplete evidence; because it rests on

questionable assumptions; or because it uses flawed logic, is

contradictory, or overlooks what you take to be the real issue.

To move the conversation forward (and, indeed, to justify your

very act of writing), you need to demonstrate that you have

something to contribute.

You can even disagree by making what we call the “duh”

move, in which you disagree not with the position itself but

with the assumption that it is a new or stunning revelation.

Here is an example of such a move, used to open an essay on

the state of American schools.

According to a recent report by some researchers at Stanford Uni-

versity, high school students with college aspirations “often lack

crucial information on applying to college and on succeeding aca-

demically once they get there.”

Well, duh. . . . It shouldn’t take a Stanford research team to tell

us that when it comes to “succeeding academically,” many students

don’t have a clue.

Gerald Graff, “Trickle-Down Obfuscation”

Like all of the other moves discussed in this book, the “duh”

move can be tailored to meet the needs of almost any writing

situation. If you find the expression “duh” too brash to use with

your intended audience, you can always dispense with the term

itself and write something like “It is true that ; but

we already knew that.”

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four four “YES / NO / OKAY, BUT”

templates for disagreeing, with reasons

j X is mistaken because she overlooks recent fossil discoveries in

the South.

j X’s claim that rests upon the questionable assumption

that .

j I disagree with X’s view that because, as recent

research has shown, .

j X contradicts herself/can’t have it both ways. On the one

hand, she argues . On the other hand, she also

says .

j By focusing on , X overlooks the deeper problem

of .

You can also disagree by making what we call the “twist

it” move, in which you agree with the evidence that someone

else has presented but show through a twist of logic that this

evidence actually supports your own, contrary position. For

example:

X argues for stricter gun control legislation, saying that the crime

rate is on the rise and that we need to restrict the circulation of

guns. I agree that the crime rate is on the rise, but that’s precisely

why I oppose stricter gun control legislation. We need to own guns

to protect ourselves against criminals.

In this example of the “twist it” move, the writer agrees with

X’s claim that the crime rate is on the rise but then argues that

this increasing crime rate is in fact a valid reason for opposing

gun control legislation.

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Three Ways to Respond

At times you might be reluctant to express disagreement,

for any number of reasons—not wanting to be unpleasant,

to hurt someone’s feelings, or to make yourself vulnerable to

being disagreed with in return. One of these reasons may in fact

explain why the conference speaker we described at the start of

Chapter 1 avoided mentioning the disagreement he had with

other scholars until he was provoked to do so in the discussion

that followed his talk.

As much as we understand such fears of conflict and have

experienced them ourselves, we nevertheless believe it is better

to state our disagreements in frank yet considerate ways than to

deny them. After all, suppressing disagreements doesn’t make

them go away; it only pushes them underground, where they

can fester in private unchecked. Nevertheless, disagreements

do not need to take the form of personal put-downs. Further-

more, there is usually no reason to take issue with every aspect

of someone else’s views. You can single out for criticism only

those aspects of what someone else has said that are troubling,

and then agree with the rest—although such an approach, as

we will see later in this chapter, leads to the somewhat more

complicated terrain of both agreeing and disagreeing at the

same time.

agree—but with a difference

Like disagreeing, agreeing is less simple than it may appear. Just

as you need to avoid simply contradicting views you disagree

with, you also need to do more than simply echo views you agree

with. Even as you’re agreeing, it’s important to bring something

new and fresh to the table, adding something that makes you

a valuable participant in the conversation.

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four four “YES / NO / OKAY, BUT”

There are many moves that enable you to contribute some-

thing of your own to a conversation even as you agree with

what someone else has said. You may point out some unno-

ticed evidence or line of reasoning that supports X’s claims that

X herself hadn’t mentioned. You may cite some corroborating

personal experience, or a situation not mentioned by X that

her views help readers understand. If X’s views are particularly

challenging or esoteric, what you bring to the table could be an

accessible translation—an explanation for readers not already in

the know. In other words, your text can usefully contribute to

the conversation simply by pointing out unnoticed implications

or explaining something that needs to be better understood.

Whatever mode of agreement you choose, the important

thing is to open up some difference or contrast between your

position and the one you’re agreeing with rather than simply

parroting what it says.

templates for agreeing

j I agree that diversity in the student body is educationally valuable

because my experience at Central University confirms it.

j X is surely right about because, as she may not be

aware, recent studies have shown that .

j X’s theory of is extremely useful because it sheds

light on the difficult problem of .

j Those unfamiliar with this school of thought may be interested

to know that it basically boils down to .

Some writers avoid the practice of agreeing almost as much as

others avoid disagreeing. In a culture like America’s that prizes

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Three Ways to Respond

originality, independence, and competitive individualism, writ-

ers sometimes don’t like to admit that anyone else has made the

same point, seemingly beating them to the punch. In our view,

however, as long as you can support a view taken by someone

else without merely restating what he or she has said, there is

no reason to worry about being “unoriginal.” Indeed, there is

good reason to rejoice when you agree with others since those

others can lend credibility to your argument. While you don’t

want to present yourself as a mere copycat of someone else’s

views, you also need to avoid sounding like a lone voice in

the wilderness.

But do be aware that whenever you agree with one person’s

view, you are likely disagreeing with someone else’s. It is hard

to align yourself with one position without at least implicitly

positioning yourself against others. The psychologist Carol

Gilligan does just that in an essay in which she agrees with

scientists who argue that the human brain is “hard-wired”

for cooperation, but in so doing aligns herself against any-

one who believes that the brain is wired for selfishness and

competition.

These findings join a growing convergence of evidence across the

human sciences leading to a revolutionary shift in consciousness.

. . . If cooperation, typically associated with altruism and self-

sacrifice, sets off the same signals of delight as pleasures commonly

associated with hedonism and self-indulgence; if the opposition

between selfish and selfless, self vs. relationship biologically makes

no sense, then a new paradigm is necessary to reframe the very

terms of the conversation.

Carol Gilligan, “Sisterhood Is Pleasurable:

A Quiet Revolution in Psychology”

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four four “YES / NO / OKAY, BUT”

In agreeing with some scientists that “the opposition between

selfish and selfless . . . makes no sense,” Gilligan implicitly

disagrees with anyone who thinks the opposition does make

sense. Basically, what Gilligan says could be boiled down to a

template.

j I agree that , a point that needs emphasizing since

so many people still believe .

j If group X is right that , as I think they are, then we

need to reassess the popular assumption that .

What such templates allow you to do, then, is to agree with

one view while challenging another—a move that leads into

the domain of agreeing and disagreeing simultaneously.

agree and disagree simultaneously

This last option is often our favorite way of responding. One

thing we particularly like about agreeing and disagreeing simul-

taneously is that it helps us get beyond the kind of “is too” / “is

not” exchanges that often characterize the disputes of young

children and the more polarized shouting matches of talk radio

and TV.

templates for agreeing

and disagreeing simultaneously

“Yes and no.” “Yes, but . . . ” “Although I agree up to a point, I

still insist . . . ” These are just some of the ways you can make

your argument complicated and nuanced while maintaining a

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Three Ways to Respond

clear, reader-friendly framework. The parallel structure—“yes

and no”; “on the one hand I agree, on the other I disagree”—

enables readers to place your argument on that map of positions

we spoke of earlier in this chapter while still keeping your argu-

ment sufficiently complex.

Another aspect we like about this option is that it can be

tipped subtly toward agreement or disagreement, depending on

where you lay your stress. If you want to stress the disagreement

end of the spectrum, you would use a template like the one below.

j Although I agree with X up to a point, I cannot accept his over-

riding assumption that religion is no longer a major force today.

Conversely, if you want to stress your agreement more than your

disagreement, you would use a template like this one.

j Although I disagree with much that X says, I fully endorse his

final conclusion that .

The first template above might be called a “yes, but . . . ” move,

the second a “no, but . . . ” move. Other versions include the

following.

j Though I concede that , I still insist that .

j X is right that , but she seems on more dubious ground

when she claims that .

j While X is probably wrong when she claims that , she

is right that .

j Whereas X provides ample evidence that , Y and

Z’s research on and convinces me that

instead.

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four four “YES / NO / OKAY, BUT”

Another classic way to agree and disagree at the same time

is to make what we call an “I’m of two minds” or a “mixed

feelings” move.

j I’m of two minds about X’s claim that . On the one

hand, I agree that . On the other hand, I’m not sure

if .

j My feelings on the issue are mixed. I do support X’s position

that , but I find Y’s argument about and

Z’s research on to be equally persuasive.

This move can be especially useful if you are responding to new

or particularly challenging work and are as yet unsure where

you stand. It also lends itself well to the kind of speculative

investigation in which you weigh a position’s pros and cons

rather than come out decisively either for or against. But again,

as we suggest earlier, whether you are agreeing, disagreeing, or

both agreeing and disagreeing, you need to be as clear as pos-

sible, and making a frank statement that you are ambivalent

is one way to be clear.

is being undecided okay?

Nevertheless, writers often have as many concerns about

expressing ambivalence as they do about expressing disagree-

ment or agreement. Some worry that by expressing ambivalence

they will come across as evasive, wishy-washy, or unsure of

themselves. Others worry that their ambivalence will end up

confusing readers who require decisive clear-cut conclusions.

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Three Ways to Respond

The truth is that in some cases these worries are legitimate.

At times ambivalence can frustrate readers, leaving them

with the feeling that you failed in your obligation to offer the

guidance they expect from writers. At other times, however,

acknowledging that a clear-cut resolution of an issue is impos-

sible can demonstrate your sophistication as a writer. In an

academic culture that values complex thought, forthrightly

declaring that you have mixed feelings can be impressive,

especially after having ruled out the one-dimensional positions

on your issue taken by others in the conversation. Ultimately,

then, how ambivalent you end up being comes down to a judg-

ment call based on different readers’ responses to your drafts,

on your knowledge of your audience, and on the challenges of

your particular argument and situation.

Exercises

1. Read one of the essays in the back of this book or on

theysayiblog.com, identifying those places where the author

agrees with others, disagrees, or both.

2. Write an essay responding in some way to the essay that

you worked with in the preceding exercise. You’ll want to

summarize and/or quote some of the author’s ideas and make

clear whether you’re agreeing, disagreeing, or both agreeing

and disagreeing with what he or she says. Remember that

there are templates in this book that can help you get started;

see Chapters 1–3 for templates that will help you represent

other people’s ideas, and Chapter 4 for templates that will

get you started with your response.

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FIVE

“and yet”

Distinguishing What You Say

from What They Say

If good academic writing involves putting yourself into

dialogue with others, it is extremely important that readers be

able to tell at every point when you are expressing your own

view and when you are stating someone else’s. This chapter

takes up the problem of moving from what they say to what

you say without confusing readers about who is saying what.

determine who is saying what

in the texts you read

Before examining how to signal who is saying what in your

own writing, let’s look at how to recognize such signals when

they appear in the texts you read—an especially important skill

when it comes to the challenging works assigned in school.

Frequently, when students have trouble understanding diffi-

cult texts, it is not just because the texts contain unfamiliar

ideas or words, but because the texts rely on subtle clues to let

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Distinguishing What You Say from What They Say

readers know when a particular view should be attributed to

the writer or to someone else. Especially with texts that pres-

ent a true dialogue of perspectives, readers need to be alert to

the often subtle markers that indicate whose voice the writer

is speaking in.

Consider how the social critic and educator Gregory Mant-

sios uses these “voice markers,” as they might be called, to

distinguish the different perspectives in his essay on America’s

class inequalities.

“We are all middle-class,” or so it would seem. Our national con-

sciousness, as shaped in large part by the media and our political

leadership, provides us with a picture of ourselves as a nation of

prosperity and opportunity with an ever expanding middle-class

life-style. As a result, our class differences are muted and our col-

lective character is homogenized.

Yet class divisions are real and arguably the most significant

factor in determining both our very being in the world and the

nature of the society we live in.

Gregory Mantsios, “Rewards and Opportunities:

The Politics and Economics of Class in the U.S.”

Although Mantsios makes it look easy, he is actually making

several sophisticated rhetorical moves here that help him dis-

tinguish the common view he opposes from his own position.

In the opening sentence, for instance, the phrase “or so it

would seem” shows that Mantsios does not necessarily agree

with the view he is describing, since writers normally don’t pres-

ent views they themselves hold as ones that only “seem” to be

true. Mantsios also places this opening view in quotation marks

to signal that it is not his own. He then further distances

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five five “AND YET”

himself from the belief being summarized in the opening para-

graph by attributing it to “our national consciousness, as shaped

in large part by the media and our political leadership,” and

then further attributing to this “consciousness” a negative,

undesirable “result”: one in which “our class differences” get

“muted” and “our collective character” gets “homogenized,”

stripped of its diversity and distinctness. Hence, even before

Mantsios has declared his own position in the second para-

graph, readers can get a pretty solid sense of where he probably

stands.

Furthermore, the second paragraph opens with the word

“yet,” indicating that Mantsios is now shifting to his own view

(as opposed to the common view he has thus far been describ-

ing). Even the parallelism he sets up between the first and

second paragraphs—between the first paragraph’s claim that

class differences do not exist and the second paragraph’s claim

that they do—helps throw into sharp relief the differences

between the two voices. Finally, Mantsios’s use of a direct,

authoritative, declarative tone in the second paragraph also

suggests a switch in voice. Although he does not use the words

“I say” or “I argue,” he clearly identifies the view he holds by

presenting it not as one that merely seems to be true or that

others tell us is true, but as a view that is true or, as Mantsios

puts it, “real.”

Paying attention to these voice markers is an important

aspect of reading comprehension. Readers who fail to notice

these markers often take an author’s summaries of what some-

one else believes to be an expression of what the author himself

or herself believes. Thus when we teach Mantsios’s essay, some

students invariably come away thinking that the statement “we

are all middle-class” is Mantsios’s own position rather than the

perspective he is opposing, failing to see that in writing these

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Distinguishing What You Say from What They Say

words Mantsios acts as a kind of ventriloquist, mimicking what

others say rather than directly expressing what he himself is

thinking.

To see how important such voice markers are, consider what

the Mantsios passage looks like if we remove them.

We are all middle-class. . . . We are a nation of prosperity and

opportunity with an ever expanding middle-class life-style. . . .

Class divisions are real and arguably the most significant factor

in determining both our very being in the world and the nature of

the society we live in.

In contrast to the careful delineation between voices in Mant-

sios’s original text, this unmarked version leaves it hard to tell

where his voice begins and the voices of others end. With the

markers removed, readers cannot tell that “We are all middle-

class” represents a view the author opposes, and that “Class

divisions are real” represents what the author himself believes.

Indeed, without the markers, especially the “Yet,” readers might

well miss the fact that the second paragraph’s claim that “Class

divisions are real” contradicts the first paragraph’s claim that

“We are all middle-class.”

templates for signaling who is saying what

in your own writing

To avoid confusion in your own writing, make sure that at every

point your readers can clearly tell who is saying what. To do so,

you can use as voice-identifying devices many of the templates

presented in previous chapters.

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five five “AND YET”

j Although X makes the best possible case for universal,

government-funded health care, I am not persuaded.

j My view, however, contrary to what X has argued, is that

j Adding to X’s argument, I would point out that .

j According to both X and Y, .

j Politicians, X argues, should .

j Most athletes will tell you that .

but i’ve been told not to use “i”

Notice that the first three templates above use the first-person

“I” or “we,” as do many of the templates in this book, thereby

contradicting the common advice about avoiding the first

person in academic writing. Although you may have been

told that the “I” word encourages subjective, self-indulgent

opinions rather than well-grounded arguments, we believe

that texts using “I” can be just as well supported—or just as

self-indulgent—as those that don’t. For us, well-supported argu-

ments are grounded in persuasive reasons and evidence, not in

the use or nonuse of any particular pronouns.

Furthermore, if you consistently avoid the first person in

your writing, you will probably have trouble making the key

move addressed in this chapter: differentiating your views from

those of others, or even offering your own views in the first

place. But don’t just take our word for it. See for yourself how

freely the first person is used by the writers quoted in this book,

and by the writers assigned in your courses.

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Distinguishing What You Say from What They Say

Nevertheless, certain occasions may warrant avoiding the

first person and writing, for example, that “she is correct”

instead

of “I think that she is correct.” Since it can be monotonous to read

an unvarying series of “I” statements (“I believe . . . I think . . .

I argue”), it is a good idea to mix first-person assertions with ones

like the following.

j X is right that certain common patterns can be found in the

communities .

j The evidence shows that .

j X’s assertion that does not fit the facts.

j Anyone familiar with should agree that .

One might even follow Mantsios’s lead, as in the following

template.

j But are real, and are arguably the most significant

factor in .

On the whole, however, academic writing today,

even in the sciences and social sciences, makes use

of the first person fairly liberally.

another trick for identifying

who is speaking

To alert readers about whose perspective you are describing at

any given moment, you don’t always have to use overt voice

markers like “X argues” followed by a summary of the argu-

ment. Instead, you can alert readers about whose voice you’re

See pp. 252–59

for an example

of the way a

physicist uses

the first person.

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five five “AND YET”

speaking in by embedding a reference to X’s argument in your

own sentences. Hence, instead of writing:

Liberals believe that cultural differences need to be respected. I

have a problem with this view, however.

you might write:

I have a problem with what liberals call cultural differences.

There is a major problem with the liberal doctrine of so-called

cultural differences.

You can also embed references to something you yourself have

previously said. So instead of writing two cumbersome sen-

tences like:

Earlier in this chapter we coined the term “voice markers.” We

would argue that such markers are extremely important for reading

comprehension.

you might write:

We would argue that “voice markers,” as we identified them earlier,

are extremely important for reading comprehension.

Embedded references like these allow you to economize your

train of thought and refer to other perspectives without any

major interruption.

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Distinguishing What You Say from What They Say

templates for embedding voice markers

j X overlooks what I consider an important point about cultural

differences.

j My own view is that what X insists is a is in fact

a .

j I wholeheartedly endorse what X calls .

j These conclusions, which X discusses in , add weight

to the argument that .

When writers fail to use voice-marking devices like the ones

discussed in this chapter, their summaries of others’ views tend to

become confused with their own ideas—and vice versa. When

readers cannot tell if you are summarizing your own views or

endorsing a certain phrase or label, they have to stop and think:

“Wait. I thought the author disagreed with this claim. Has she

actually been asserting this view all along?” or “Hmmm, I thought

she would have objected to this kind of phrase. Is she actually

endorsing it?” Getting in the habit of using voice markers will

keep you from confusing your readers and help alert you to similar

markers in the challenging texts you read.

Exercises

1. To see how one writer signals when she is asserting her

own views and when she is summarizing those of someone

else, read the following passage by the social historian Julie

Charlip. As you do so, identify those spots where Charlip

refers to the views of others and the signal phrases she uses

to distinguish her views from theirs.

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five five “AND YET”

Marx and Engels wrote: “Society as a whole is more and more split-

ting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly

facing each other—the bourgeoisie and the proletariat” (10). If

only that were true, things might be more simple. But in late

twentieth-century America, it seems that society is splitting more

and more into a plethora of class factions—the working class, the

working poor, lower-middle class, upper-middle class, lower uppers,

and upper uppers. I find myself not knowing what class I’m from.

In my days as a newspaper reporter, I once asked a sociology pro-

fessor what he thought about the reported shrinking of the middle

class. Oh, it’s not the middle class that’s disappearing, he said, but

the working class. His definition: if you earn thirty thousand dollars

a year working in an assembly plant, come home from work, open a

beer and watch the game, you are working class; if you earn twenty

thousand dollars a year as a school teacher, come home from work

to a glass of white wine and PBS, you are middle class.

How do we define class? Is it an issue of values, lifestyle, taste?

Is it the kind of work you do, your relationship to the means of

production? Is it a matter of how much money you earn? Are we

allowed to choose? In this land of supposed classlessness, where

we don’t have the tradition of English society to keep us in our

places, how do we know where we really belong? The average

American will tell you he or she is “middle class.” I’m sure that’s

what my father would tell you. But I always felt that we were in

some no man’s land, suspended between classes, sharing similari-

ties with some and recognizing sharp, exclusionary differences

from others. What class do I come from? What class am I in

now? As an historian, I seek the answers to these questions in

the specificity of my past.

Julie Charlip, “A Real Class Act: Searching

for Identity in the Classless Society”

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Distinguishing What You Say from What They Say

2. Study a piece of your own writing to see how many perspec-

tives you account for and how well you distinguish your

own voice from those you are summarizing. Consider the

following questions:

a. How many perspectives do you engage?

b. What other perspectives might you include?

c. How do you distinguish your views from the other views

you summarize?

d. Do you use clear voice-signaling phrases?

e. What options are available to you for clarifying who is

saying what?

f. Which of these options are best suited for this particular

text?

If you find that you do not include multiple views or clearly

distinguish between others’ views and your own, revise your

text to do so.

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SIX

“skeptics may object”

Planting a Naysayer in Your Text

The writer Jane Tompkins describes a pattern that repeats

itself whenever she writes a book or an article. For the first

couple of weeks when she sits down to write, things go relatively

well. But then in the middle of the night, several weeks into the

writing process, she’ll wake up in a cold sweat, suddenly real-

izing that she has overlooked some major criticism that readers

will surely make against her ideas. Her first thought, invariably,

is that she will have to give up on the project, or that she will

have to throw out what she’s written thus far and start over.

Then she realizes that “this moment of doubt and panic is where

my text really begins.” She then revises what she’s written in a

way that incorporates the criticisms she’s anticipated, and her

text becomes stronger and more interesting as a result.

This little story contains an important lesson for all writers,

experienced and inexperienced alike. It suggests that even though

most of us are upset at the idea of someone criticizing our work,

such criticisms can actually work to our advantage. Although it’s

naturally tempting to ignore criticism of our ideas, doing so may

in fact be a big mistake, since our writing improves when we not

only listen to these objections but give them an explicit hearing

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Planting a Naysayer in Your Text

in our writing. Indeed, no single device more quickly improves a

piece of writing than planting a naysayer in the text—saying, for

example, that “although some readers may object” to something

in your argument, you “would reply that .”

anticipate objections

But wait, you say. Isn’t the advice to incorporate critical views

a recipe for destroying your credibility and undermining your

argument? Here you are, trying to say something that will hold

up, and we want you to tell readers all the negative things

someone might say against you?

Exactly. We are urging you to tell readers what others

might say against you, but our point is that doing so will actu-

ally enhance your credibility, not undermine it. As we argue

throughout this book, writing well does not mean piling up

uncontroversial truths in a vacuum; it means engaging others

in a dialogue or debate—not only by opening your text with

a summary of what others have said, as we suggest in Chapter 1,

but also by imagining what others might say against your argu-

ment as it unfolds. Once you see writing as an act of entering

a conversation, you should also see how opposing arguments

can work for you rather than against you.

Paradoxically, the more you give voice to your critics’ objec-

tions, the more you tend to disarm those critics, especially if you

go on to answer their objections in convincing ways. When you

entertain a counterargument, you make a kind of preemptive

strike, identifying problems with your argument before oth-

ers can point them out for you. Furthermore, by entertaining

counterarguments, you show respect for your readers, treating

them not as gullible dupes who will believe anything you say

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s i x six “SKEPTICS MAY OBJECT”

but as independent, critical thinkers who are aware that your

view is not the only one in town. In addition, by imagining

what others might say against your claims, you come across as

a generous, broad-minded person who is confident enough to

open himself or herself to debate—like the writer in the figure

on the following page.

Conversely, if you don’t entertain counterarguments, you may

very likely come across as closed-minded, as if you think your

beliefs are beyond dispute. You might also leave important ques-

tions hanging and concerns about your arguments unaddressed.

Finally, if you fail to plant a naysayer in your text, you may

find that you have very little to say. Our own students often say

that entertaining counterarguments makes it easier to generate

enough text to meet their assignment’s page-length requirements.

Planting a naysayer in your text is a relatively simple move,

as you can see by looking at the following passage from a book

by the writer Kim Chernin. Having spent some thirty pages

complaining about the pressure on American women to be

thin, Chernin inserts a whole chapter entitled “The Skeptic,”

opening it as follows.

At this point I would like to raise certain objections that have been

inspired by the skeptic in me. She feels that I have been ignoring

some of the most common assumptions we all make about our bod-

ies and these she wishes to see addressed. For example: “You know

perfectly well,” she says to me, “that you feel better when you lose

weight. You buy new clothes. You look at yourself more eagerly in

the mirror. When someone invites you to a party you don’t stop

and ask yourself whether you want to go. You feel sexier. Admit

it. You like yourself better.”

Kim Chernin, The Obsession:

Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness

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Planting a Naysayer in Your Text

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s i x six “SKEPTICS MAY OBJECT”

The remainder of Chernin’s chapter consists of her answers

to this inner skeptic. In the face of the skeptic’s challenge to

her book’s central premise (that the pressure to diet seriously

harms women’s lives), Chernin responds neither by repressing

the skeptic’s critical voice nor by giving in to it and relinquish-

ing her own position. Instead, she embraces that voice and

writes it into her text. Note too that instead of dispatching

this naysaying voice quickly, as many of us would be tempted

to do, Chernin stays with it and devotes a full paragraph to

it. By borrowing some of Chernin’s language, we can come up

with templates for entertaining virtually any objection.

templates for entertaining objections

j At this point I would like to raise some objections that have been

inspired by the skeptic in me. She feels that I have been ignoring

the complexities of the situation.

j Yet some readers may challenge my view by insisting that

j Of course, many will probably disagree on the grounds that

Note that the objections in the above templates are

attributed not to any specific person or group, but to “skep-

tics,” “readers,” or “many.” This kind of nameless, faceless

naysayer is perfectly appropriate in many cases. But the ideas

that motivate arguments and objections often can—and, where

possible, should—be ascribed to a specific ideology or school

of thought (for example, liberals, Christian fundamentalists,

neopragmatists) rather than to anonymous anybodies. In other

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Planting a Naysayer in Your Text

words, naysayers can be labeled, and you can add precision and

impact to your writing by identifying what those labels are.

templates for naming your naysayers

j Here many feminists would probably object that gender does

influence language.

j But social Darwinists would certainly take issue with the argu-

ment that .

j Biologists, of course, may want to question whether .

j Nevertheless, both followers and critics of Malcolm X will prob-

ably suggest otherwise and argue that .

To be sure, some people dislike such labels and may even

resent having labels applied to themselves. Some feel that

labels put individuals in boxes, stereotyping them and glossing

over what makes each of us unique. And it’s true that labels

can be used inappropriately, in ways that ignore individuality

and promote stereotypes. But since the life of ideas, includ-

ing many of our most private thoughts, is conducted through

groups and types rather than solitary individuals, intellectual

exchange requires labels to give definition and serve as a

convenient shorthand. If you categorically reject all labels,

you give up an important resource and even mislead readers

by presenting yourself and others as having no connection to

anyone else. You also miss an opportunity to generalize the

importance and relevance of your work to some larger con-

versation. When you attribute a position you are summarizing

to liberalism, say, or historical materialism, your argument is

no longer just about your own solitary views but about the

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s i x six “SKEPTICS MAY OBJECT”

intersection of broad ideas and habits of mind that many

readers may already have a stake in.

The way to minimize the problem of stereotyping, then, is

not to categorically reject labels but to refine and qualify their

use, as the following templates demonstrate.

j Although not all Christians think alike, some of them will prob-

ably dispute my claim that .

j Non-native English speakers are so diverse in their views that it’s

hard to generalize about them, but some are likely to object on

the grounds that .

Another way to avoid needless stereotyping is to qualify labels

carefully, substituting “pro bono lawyers” for “lawyers” in gen-

eral, for example, or “quantitative sociologists” for all “social

scientists,” and so on.

templates for introducing objections

informally

Objections can also be introduced in more informal ways. For

instance, you can frame objections in the form of questions.

j But is my proposal realistic? What are the chances of its actually

being adopted?

j Yet is it necessarily true that ? Is it always the case,

as I have been suggesting, that ?

j However, does the evidence I’ve cited prove conclusively

that ?

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Planting a Naysayer in Your Text

You can also let your naysayer speak directly.

j “Impossible,” some will say. “You must be reading the research

selectively.”

Moves like this allow you to cut directly to the skeptical voice

itself, as the singer-songwriter Joe Jackson does in the follow-

ing excerpt from a New York Times article complaining about

the restrictions on public smoking in New York City bars and

restaurants.

I like a couple of cigarettes or a cigar with a drink, and like many

other people, I only smoke in bars or nightclubs. Now I can’t go to

any of my old haunts. Bartenders who were friends have turned into

cops, forcing me outside to shiver in the cold and curse under my

breath. . . . It’s no fun. Smokers are being demonized and victim-

ized all out of proportion.

“Get over it,” say the anti-smokers. “You’re the minority.” I

thought a great city was a place where all kinds of minorities could

thrive. . . . “Smoking kills,” they say. As an occasional smoker

with otherwise healthy habits, I’ll take my chances. Health con-

sciousness is important, but so are pleasure and freedom of choice.

Joe Jackson, “Want to Smoke? Go to Hamburg”

Jackson could have begun his second paragraph, in which

he shifts from his own voice to that of his imagined nay-

sayer, more formally, as follows: “Of course anti-smokers will

object that since we smokers are in the minority, we should

simply stop complaining and quietly make the sacrifices we are

being called on to make for the larger social good.” Or “Anti-

smokers might insist, however, that the smoking minority

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s i x six “SKEPTICS MAY OBJECT”

should submit to the non-smoking majority.” We think,

though, that Jackson gets the job done in a far more lively

way with the more colloquial form he chooses. Borrowing

a standard move of playwrights and novelists, Jackson cuts

directly to the objectors’ view and then to his own retort, then

back to the objectors’ view and then to his own retort again,

thereby creating a kind of dialogue or miniature play within

his own text. This move works well for Jackson, but

only because he uses quotation marks and other voice

markers to make clear at every point whose voice

he is in.

represent objections fairly

Once you’ve decided to introduce a differing or opposing view

into your writing, your work has only just begun, since you

still need to represent and explain that view with fairness and

generosity. Although it is tempting to give opposing views

short shrift, to hurry past them, or even to mock them, doing

so is usually counterproductive. When writers make the best

case they can for their critics (playing Peter Elbow’s “believ-

ing game”), they actually bolster their credibility with

readers rather than undermine it. They make readers

think, “This is a writer I can trust.”

We recommend, then, that whenever you entertain objec-

tions in your writing, you stay with them for several sentences

or even paragraphs and take them as seriously as possible. We

also recommend that you read your summary of opposing views

with an outsider’s eye: put yourself in the shoes of someone who

disagrees with you and ask if such a reader would recognize

himself in your summary. Would that reader think you have

See Chapter 5

for more

advice on

using voice

markers.

See pp. 31–32

for more on

the believing

game.

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Planting a Naysayer in Your Text

taken his views seriously, as beliefs that reasonable people might

hold? Or would he detect a mocking tone or an oversimplifica-

tion of his views?

There will always be certain objections, to be sure, that you

believe do not deserve to be represented, just as there will be

objections that seem so unworthy of respect that they inspire

ridicule. Remember, however, that if you do choose to mock a

view that you oppose, you are likely to alienate those readers

who don’t already agree with you—likely the very readers you

want to reach. Also be aware that in mocking another’s view

you may contribute to a hostile argument culture in which

someone may ridicule you in return.

answer objections

Do be aware that when you represent objections successfully,

you still need to be able to answer those objections persuasively.

After all, when you write objections into a text, you take the

risk that readers will find those objections more convincing

than the argument you yourself are advancing. In the edito-

rial quoted above, for example, Joe Jackson takes the risk that

readers will identify more with the anti-smoking view he sum-

marizes than with the pro-smoking position he endorses.

This is precisely what Benjamin Franklin describes hap-

pening to himself in The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

(1793), when he recalls being converted to Deism (a religion

that exalts reason over spirituality) by reading anti-Deist books.

When he encountered the views of Deists being negatively

summarized by authors who opposed them, Franklin explains,

he ended up finding the Deist position more persuasive.

To avoid having this kind if unintentional reverse effect on

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s i x six “SKEPTICS MAY OBJECT”

readers, you need to do your best to make sure that any counter-

arguments you address are not more convincing than your own

claims. It is good to address objections in your writing, but only

if you are able to overcome them.

One surefire way to fail to overcome an objection is to dis-

miss it out of hand—saying, for example, “That’s just wrong.”

The difference between such a response (which offers no sup-

porting reasons whatsoever) and the types of nuanced responses

we’re promoting in this book is the difference between bullying

your readers and genuinely persuading them.

Often the best way to overcome an objection is not to try

to refute it completely but to agree with part of it while chal-

lenging only the part you dispute. In other words, in answer-

ing counterarguments, it is often best to say “yes, but” or “yes

and no,” treating the counterview as an opportunity to

revise and refine your own position. Rather than build

your argument into an impenetrable fortress, it is often

best to make concessions while still standing your ground, as

Kim Chernin does in the following response to the counter-

argument quoted above. While in the voice of the “skeptic,”

Chernin writes: “Admit it. You like yourself better when you’ve

lost weight.” In response, Chernin replies as follows.

Can I deny these things? No woman who has managed to lose

weight would wish to argue with this. Most people feel better about

themselves when they become slender. And yet, upon reflection,

it seems to me that there is something precarious about this well-

being. After all, 98 percent of people who lose weight gain it back.

Indeed, 90 percent of those who have dieted “successfully” gain

back more than they ever lost. Then, of course, we can no longer

bear to look at ourselves in the mirror.

See pp. 61–64

for more on

agreeing, with

a difference.

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Planting a Naysayer in Your Text

In this way, Chernin shows how you can use a counterview to

improve and refine your overall argument by making a conces-

sion. Even as she concedes that losing weight feels good in the

short run, she argues that in the long run the weight always

returns, making the dieter far more miserable.

templates for making concessions

while still standing your ground

j Although I grant that the book is poorly organized, I still maintain

that it raises an important issue.

j Proponents of X are right to argue that . But they

exaggerate when they claim that .

j While it is true that , it does not necessarily follow

that .

j On the one hand, I agree with X that . But on the

other hand, I still insist that .

Templates like these show that answering naysayers’ objec-

tions does not have to be an all-or-nothing affair in which you

either definitively refute your critics or they definitively refute

you. Often the most productive engagements among differing

views end with a combined vision that incorporates elements

of each one.

But what if you’ve tried out all the possible answers you can

think of to an objection you’ve anticipated and you still have

a nagging feeling that the objection is more convincing than

your argument itself? In that case, the best remedy is to go

back and make some fundamental revisions to your argument,

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s i x six “SKEPTICS MAY OBJECT”

even reversing your position completely if need be. Although

finding out late in the game that you aren’t fully convinced by

your own argument can be painful, it can actually make your

final text more intellectually honest, challenging, and serious.

After all, the goal of writing is not to keep proving that what-

ever you initially said is right, but to stretch the limits of your

thinking. So if planting a strong naysayer in your text forces

you to change your mind, that’s not a bad thing. Some would

argue that that is what the academic world is all about.

Exercises

1. Read the following passage by the cultural critic Eric

Schlosser. As you’ll see, he hasn’t planted any naysayers

in this text. Do it for him. Insert a brief paragraph stating

an objection to his argument and then responding to the

objection as he might.

The United States must declare an end to the war on drugs. This

war has filled the nation’s prisons with poor drug addicts and small-

time drug dealers. It has created a multibillion-dollar black market,

enriched organized crime groups and promoted the corruption of

government officials throughout the world. And it has not stemmed

the widespread use of illegal drugs. By any rational measure, this

war has been a total failure.

We must develop public policies on substance abuse that are

guided not by moral righteousness or political expediency but by

common sense. The United States should immediately decriminal-

ize the cultivation and possession of small amounts of marijuana for

personal use. Marijuana should no longer be classified as a Sched-

ule I narcotic, and those who seek to use marijuana as medicine

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Planting a Naysayer in Your Text

should no longer face criminal sanctions. We must shift our entire

approach to drug abuse from the criminal justice system to the

public health system. Congress should appoint an independent

commission to study the harm-reduction policies that have been

adopted in Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands. The

commission should recommend policies for the United States based

on one important criterion: what works.

In a nation where pharmaceutical companies advertise powerful

antidepressants on billboards and where alcohol companies run amus-

ing beer ads during the Super Bowl, the idea of a “drug-free society”

is absurd. Like the rest of American society, our drug policy would

greatly benefit from less punishment and more compassion.

Eric Schlosser, “A People’s Democratic Platform”

2. Look over something you’ve written that makes an argu-

ment. Check to see if you’ve anticipated and responded to

any objections. If not, revise your text to do so. If so, have

you anticipated all the likely objections? Who if anyone

have you attributed the objections to? Have you represented

the objections fairly? Have you answered them well enough,

or do you think you now need to qualify your own argu-

ment? Could you use any of the language suggested in this

chapter? Does the introduction of a naysayer strengthen your

argument? Why, or why not?

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SEVEN

“so what? who cares?”

Saying Why It Matters

Baseball is the national pastime. Bernini was the best

sculptor of the baroque period. All writing is conversational.

So what? Who cares? Why does any of this matter?

How many times have you had reason to ask these ques-

tions? Regardless of how interesting a topic may be to you as a

writer, readers always need to know what is at stake in a text

and why they should care. All too often, however, these ques-

tions are left unanswered—mainly because writers and speakers

assume that audiences will know the answers already or will

figure them out on their own. As a result, students come away

from lectures feeling like outsiders to what they’ve just heard,

just as many of us feel left hanging after talks we’ve attended.

The problem is not necessarily that the speakers lack a clear,

well-focused thesis or that the thesis is inadequately supported

with evidence. Instead, the problem is that the speakers don’t

address the crucial question of why their arguments matter.

That this question is so often left unaddressed is unfortunate

since the speakers generally could offer interesting, engaging

answers. When pressed, for instance, most academics will tell

you that their lectures and articles matter because they address

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Saying Why It Matters

some belief that needs to be corrected or updated—and because

their arguments have important, real-world consequences. Yet

many academics fail to identify these reasons and consequences

explicitly in what they say and write. Rather than assume that

audiences will know why their claims matter, all writers need

to answer the “so what?” and “who cares?” questions up front.

Not everyone can claim to have a cure for cancer or a solution

to end poverty. But writers who fail to show that others should

care or already do care about their claims will ultimately lose

their audiences’ interest.

This chapter focuses on various moves that you can make to

answer the “who cares?” and “so what?” questions in your own

writing. In one sense, the two questions get at the same thing: the

relevance or importance of what you are saying. Yet they get at this

significance in different ways. Whereas “who cares?” literally asks

you to identify a person or group who cares about your claims, “so

what?” asks about the real-world applications and consequences of

those claims—what difference it would make if they were accepted.

We’ll look first at ways of making clear who cares.

“who cares?”

To see how one writer answers the “who cares?” question,

consider the following passage from the science writer Denise

Grady. Writing in the New York Times, she explains some of

the latest research into fat cells.

Scientists used to think body fat and the cells it was made of

were pretty much inert, just an oily storage compartment. But

within the past decade research has shown that fat cells act like

chemical factories and that body fat is potent stuff: a highly active

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seven seven “SO WHAT? WHO CARES?”

tissue that secretes hormones and other substances with profound

and sometimes harmful effects. . . .

In recent years, biologists have begun calling fat an “endocrine

organ,” comparing it to glands like the thyroid and pituitary, which

also release hormones straight into the bloodstream.

Denise Grady, “The Secret Life of a Potent Cell”

Notice how Grady’s writing reflects the central advice we

give in this book, offering a clear claim and also framing that

claim as a response to what someone else has said. In so doing,

Grady immediately identifies at least one group with a stake

in the new research that sees fat as “active,” “potent stuff ”:

namely, the scientific community, which formerly believed

that body fat is inert. By referring to these scientists, Grady

implicitly acknowledges that her text is part of a larger con-

versation and shows who besides herself has an interest in

what she says.

Consider, however, how the passage would read had Grady

left out what “scientists used to think” and simply explained

the new findings in isolation.

Within the past few decades research has shown that fat cells act

like chemical factories and that body fat is potent stuff: a highly

active tissue that secretes hormones and other substances. In recent

years, biologists have begun calling fat an “endocrine organ,” com-

paring it to glands like the thyroid and pituitary, which also release

hormones straight into the bloodstream.

Though this statement is clear and easy to follow, it lacks any

indication that anyone needs to hear it. Okay, one nods while

reading this passage, fat is an active, potent thing. Sounds plau-

sible enough; no reason to think it’s not true. But does anyone

really care? Who, if anyone, is interested?

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Saying Why It Matters

templates for indicating who cares

To address “who cares?” questions in your own writing, we

suggest using templates like the following, which echo Grady

in refuting earlier thinking.

j Parents used to think spanking was necessary. But recently

[or within the past few decades] experts suggest that it can be

counterproductive.

j This interpretation challenges the work of those critics who have

long assumed that .

j These findings challenge the work of earlier researchers, who

tended to assume that .

j Recent studies like these shed new light on , which

previous studies had not addressed.

Grady might have been more explicit by writing the “who cares?”

question directly into her text, as in the following template.

j But who really cares? Who besides me and a handful of recent

researchers has a stake in these claims? At the very least, the

researchers who formerly believed should care.

To gain greater authority as a writer, it can help to name spe-

cific people or groups who have a stake in your claims and to

go into some detail about their views.

j Researchers have long assumed that . For instance,

one eminent scholar of cell biology, , assumed

in , her seminal work on cell structures and functions,

that fat cells . As herself put it, “ ”

(2012). Another leading scientist, , argued that fat

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seven seven “SO WHAT? WHO CARES?”

cells “ ” (2011). Ultimately, when it came to the nature

of fat, the basic assumption was that .

But a new body of research shows that fat cells are far more

complex and that .

In other cases, you might refer to certain people or groups who

should care about your claims.

j If sports enthusiasts stopped to think about it, many of them

might simply assume that the most successful athletes

. However, new research shows .

j These findings challenge neoliberals’ common assumption

that .

j At first glance, teenagers might say . But on closer

inspection .

As these templates suggest, answering the “who cares?” question

involves establishing the type of contrast between what others

say and what you say that is central to this book. Ultimately,

such templates help you create a dramatic tension or clash of

views in your writing that readers will feel invested in and want

to see resolved.

“so what?”

Although answering the “who cares?” question is crucial, in

many cases it is not enough, especially if you are writing for

general readers who don’t necessarily have a strong investment

in the particular clash of views you are setting up. In the case of

Grady’s argument about fat cells, such readers may still wonder

why it matters that some researchers think fat cells are active,

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Saying Why It Matters

while others think they’re inert. Or, to move to a different field

of study, American literature, so what if some scholars disagree

about Huck Finn’s relationship with the runaway slave Jim

in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? Why should

anyone besides a few specialists in the field care about such

disputes? What, if anything, hinges on them?

The best way to answer such questions about the larger con-

sequences of your claims is to appeal to something that your

audience already figures to care about. Whereas the “who cares?”

question asks you to identify an interested person or group, the

“so what?” question asks you to link your argument to some larger

matter that readers already deem important. Thus in analyzing

Huckleberry Finn, a writer could argue that seemingly narrow

disputes about the hero’s relationship with Jim actually shed light

on whether Twain’s canonical, widely read novel is a critique of

racism in America or is itself marred by it.

Let’s see how Grady invokes such broad, general concerns

in her article on fat cells. Her first move is to link researchers’

interest in fat cells to a general concern with obesity and health.

Researchers trying to decipher the biology of fat cells hope to find

new ways to help people get rid of excess fat or, at least, prevent

obesity from destroying their health. In an increasingly obese world,

their efforts have taken on added importance.

Further showing why readers should care, Grady’s next move

is to demonstrate the even broader relevance and urgency of

her subject matter.

Internationally, more than a billion people are overweight. Obesity

and two illnesses linked to it, heart disease and high blood pressure,

are on the World Health Organization’s list of the top 10 global health

risks. In the United States, 65 percent of adults weigh too much,

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seven seven “SO WHAT? WHO CARES?”

compared with about 56 percent a decade ago, and government

researchers blame obesity for at least 300,000 deaths a year.

What Grady implicitly says here is “Look, dear reader, you may

think that these questions about the nature of fat cells I’ve been

pursuing have little to do with everyday life. In fact, however,

these questions are extremely important—particularly in our

‘increasingly obese world’ in which we need to prevent obesity

from destroying our health.”

Notice that Grady’s phrase “in an increasingly world”

can be adapted as a strategic move to address the “so what?”

question in other fields as well. For example, a sociologist ana-

lyzing back-to-nature movements of the past thirty years might

make the following statement.

In a world increasingly dominated by cellphones and sophisticated

computer technologies, these attempts to return to nature appear

futile.

This type of move can be readily applied to other disciplines

because no matter how much disciplines may differ from one

another, the need to justify the importance of one’s concerns

is common to them all.

templates for establishing

why your claims matter

j Huckleberry Finn matters/is important because it is one of the

most widely taught novels in the American school system.

j Although X may seem trivial, it is in fact crucial in terms of today’s

concern over .

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Saying Why It Matters

j Ultimately, what is at stake here is .

j These findings have important implications for the broader

domain of .

j If we are right about , then major consequences fol-

low for .

j These conclusions/This discovery will have significant applica-

tions in as well as in .

Finally, you can also treat the “so what?” question as a related

aspect of the “who cares?” question.

j Although X may seem of concern to only a small group

of , it should in fact concern anyone who cares

about .

All these templates help you hook your readers. By suggesting

the real-world applications of your claims, the templates not only

demonstrate that others care about your claims but also tell your

readers why they should care. Again, it bears repeating that simply

stating and proving your thesis isn’t enough. You also need to

frame it in a way that helps readers care about it.

what about readers who already

know why it matters?

At this point, you might wonder if you need to answer the

“who cares?” and “so what?” questions in everything you write.

Is it really necessary to address these questions if you’re propos-

ing something so obviously consequential as, say, a treatment

for autism or a program to eliminate illiteracy? Isn’t it obvious

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seven seven “SO WHAT? WHO CARES?”

100

that everyone cares about such problems? Does it really need

to be spelled out? And what about when you’re writing for

audiences who you know are already interested in your claims

and who understand perfectly well why they’re important? In

other words, do you always need to address the “so what?” and

“who cares?” questions?

As a rule, yes—although it’s true that you can’t keep

answering them forever and at a certain point must say enough

is enough. Although a determined skeptic can infinitely ask why

something matters—“Why should I care about earning a salary?

And why should I care about supporting a family?”—you have

to stop answering at some point in your text. Nevertheless, we

urge you to go as far as possible in answering such questions.

If you take it for granted that readers will somehow intuit the

answers to “so what?” and “who cares?” on their own, you may

make your work seem less interesting than it actually is, and

you run the risk that readers will dismiss your text as irrelevant

and unimportant. By conrast, when you are careful to explain

who cares and why, it’s a little like bringing a cheerleading

squad into your text. And though some expert readers might

already know why your claims matter, even they need to be

reminded. Thus the safest move is to be as explicit as possible

in answering the “so what?” question, even for those already

in the know. When you step back from the text and explain

why it matters, you are urging your audience to keep reading,

pay attention, and care.

Exercises

1. Find several texts (scholarly essays, newspaper articles,

emails, memos, blogs, etc.) and see whether they answer

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Saying Why It Matters

101

the “so what?” and “who cares?” questions. Probably some do,

some don’t. What difference does it make whether they do

or do not? How do the authors who answer these questions

do so? Do they use any strategies or techniques that you

could borrow for your own writing? Are there any strategies

or techniques recommended in this chapter, or that you’ve

found or developed on your own, that you’d recommend to

these authors?

2. Look over something you’ve written yourself. Do you indi-

cate “so what?” and “who cares”? If not, revise your text to

do so. You might use the following template to get started.

My point here (that ) should interest those who

. Beyond this limited audience, however, my point

should speak to anyone who cares about the larger issue of

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TYING IT ALL TOGETHER

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105

EIGHT

“as a result”

Connecting the Parts

We once had a student named Bill, whose characteristic

sentence pattern went something like this.

Spot is a good dog. He has fleas.

“Connect your sentences,” we urged in the margins of Bill’s

papers. “What does Spot being good have to do with his fleas?”

“These two statements seem unrelated. Can you connect them

in some logical way?” When comments like these yielded no

results, we tried inking in suggested connections for him.

Spot is a good dog, but he has fleas.

Spot is a good dog, even though he has fleas.

But our message failed to get across, and Bill’s disconnected

sentence pattern persisted to the end of the semester.

And yet Bill did focus well on his subjects. When he men-

tioned Spot the dog (or Plato, or any other topic) in one sen-

tence, we could count on Spot (or Plato) being the topic of

the following sentence as well. This was not the case with

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eight eight “AS A RESULT”

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some of Bill’s classmates, who sometimes changed topic from

sentence to sentence or even from clause to clause within a

single sentence. But because Bill neglected to mark his con-

nections, his writing was as frustrating to read as theirs. In all

these cases, we had to struggle to figure out on our own how

the sentences and paragraphs connected or failed to connect

with one another.

What makes such writers so hard to read, in other words,

is that they never gesture back to what they have just said or

forward to what they plan to say. “Never look back” might be

their motto, almost as if they see writing as a process of think-

ing of something to say about a topic and writing it down, then

thinking of something else to say about the topic and writing

that down too, and on and on until they’ve filled the assigned

number of pages and can hand the paper in. Each sentence

basically starts a new thought, rather than growing out of or

extending the thought of the previous sentence.

When Bill talked about his writing habits, he acknowl-

edged that he never went back and read what he had written.

Indeed, he told us that, other than using his computer software

to check for spelling errors and make sure that his tenses were

all aligned, he never actually reread what he wrote before turn-

ing it in. As Bill seemed to picture it, writing was something one

did while sitting at a computer, whereas reading was a separate

activity generally reserved for an easy chair, book in hand. It

had never occurred to Bill that to write a good sentence he had

to think about how it connected to those that came before and

after; that he had to think hard about how that sentence fit

into the sentences that surrounded it. Each sentence for Bill

existed in a sort of tunnel isolated from every other sentence

on the page. He never bothered to fit all the parts of his essay

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Connecting the Parts

107

together because he apparently thought of writing as a matter

of piling up information or observations rather than building

a sustained argument. What we suggest in this chapter, then,

is that you converse not only with others in your writing but

with yourself: that you establish clear relations between one

statement and the next by connecting those statements.

This chapter addresses the issue of how to connect all the

parts of your writing. The best compositions establish a sense

of momentum and direction by making explicit connections

among their different parts, so that what is said in one sentence

(or paragraph) both sets up what is to come and is clearly

informed by what has already been said. When you write a

sentence, you create an expectation in the reader’s mind that

the next sentence will in some way echo and extend it, even

if—especially if—that next sentence takes your argument in a

new direction.

It may help to think of each sentence you write as having arms

that reach backward and forward, as the figure below suggests.

When your sentences reach outward like this, they establish con-

nections that help your writing flow smoothly in a way readers

appreciate. Conversely, when writing lacks such connections and

moves in fits and starts, readers repeatedly have to go back over

the sentences and guess at the connections on their own. To pre-

vent such disconnection and make your writing flow, we advise

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eight eight “AS A RESULT”

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following a “do it yourself ” principle, which means that it is your

job as a writer to do the hard work of making the connections

rather than, as Bill did, leaving this work to your readers.

This chapter offers several strategies you can use to put this

principle into action: (1) using transition terms (like “there-

fore” and “as a result”); (2) adding pointing words (like “this”

or “such”); (3) developing a set of key terms and phrases for

each text you write; and (4) repeating yourself, but with a

difference—a move that involves repeating what you’ve said,

but with enough variation to avoid being redundant. All these

moves require that you always look back and, in crafting any

one sentence, think hard about those that precede it.

Notice how we ourselves have used such connecting devices

thus far in this chapter. The second paragraph of this chapter,

for example, opens with the transitional “And yet,” signaling

a change in direction, while the opening sentence of the third

includes the phrase “in other words,” telling you to expect a

restatement of a point we’ve just made. If you look through this

book, you should be able to find many sentences that contain

some word or phrase that explicitly hooks them back to some-

thing said earlier, to something about to be said, or both. And

many sentences in this chapter repeat key terms related to the

idea of connection: “connect,” “disconnect,” “link,” “relate,”

“forward,” and “backward.”

use transitions

For readers to follow your train of thought, you need not only

to connect your sentences and paragraphs to each other, but

also to mark the kind of connection you are making. One of

the easiest ways to make this move is to use transitions (from

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Connecting the Parts

109

the Latin root trans, “across”), which help you cross from one

point to another in your text. Transitions are usually placed

at or near the start of sentences so they can signal to readers

where your text is going: in the same direction it has been

moving, or in a new direction. More specifically, transitions

tell readers whether your text is echoing a previous sentence or

paragraph (“in other words”), adding something to it (“in addi-

tion”), offering an example of it (“for example”), generalizing

from it (“as a result”), or modifying it (“and yet”).

The following is a list of commonly used transitions, catego-

rized according to their different functions.

addition

also indeed

and in fact

besides moreover

furthermore so too

in addition

elaboration

actually to put it another way

by extension to put it bluntly

in other words to put it succinctly

in short ultimately

that is

example

after all for instance

as an illustration specifically

consider to take a case in point

for example

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eight eight “AS A RESULT”

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cause and effect

accordingly so

as a result then

consequently therefore

hence thus

since

comparison

along the same lines likewise

in the same way similarly

contrast

although nevertheless

but nonetheless

by contrast on the contrary

conversely on the other hand

despite regardless

even though whereas

however while yet

in contrast

concession

admittedly naturally

although it is true of course

granted to be sure

conclusion

as a result in sum

consequently therefore

hence thus

in conclusion to sum up

in short to summarize

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Connecting the Parts

111

Ideally, transitions should operate so unobtrusively in a piece

of writing that they recede into the background and readers

do not even notice that they are there. It’s a bit like what

happens when drivers use their turn signals before turning

right or left: just as other drivers recognize such signals almost

unconsciously, readers should process transition terms with

a minimum of thought. But even though such terms should

function unobtrusively in your writing, they can be among the

most powerful tools in your vocabulary. Think how your heart

sinks when someone, immediately after praising you, begins a

sentence with “but” or “however.” No matter what follows, you

know it won’t be good.

Notice that some transitions can help you not only to move

from one sentence to another, but to combine two or more sen-

tences into one. Combining sentences in this way helps prevent

the choppy, staccato effect that arises when too many short sen-

tences are strung together, one after the other. For instance, to

combine Bill’s two choppy sentences (“Spot is a good dog. He

has fleas.”) into one, better-flowing sentence, we suggested that

he rewrite them as “Spot is a good dog, even though he has fleas.”

Transitions like these not only guide readers through the

twists and turns of your argument but also help ensure that you

have an argument in the first place. In fact, we think of words

like “but,” “yet,” “nevertheless,” “besides,” and others as argu-

ment words, since it’s hard to use them without making some

kind of argument. The word “therefore,” for instance, commits

you to making sure that the claims preceding it lead logically to

the conclusion that it introduces. “For example” also assumes an

argument, since it requires the material you are introducing to

stand as an instance or proof of some preceding generalization.

As a result, the more you use transitions, the more you’ll be able

not only to connect the parts of your text but also to construct

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eight eight “AS A RESULT”

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a strong argument in the first place. And if you draw on them

frequently enough, using them should eventually become sec-

ond nature.

To be sure, it is possible to overuse transitions, so take time to

read over your drafts carefully and eliminate any transitions that

are unnecessary. But following the maxim that you need to learn

the basic moves of argument before you can deliberately depart

from them, we advise you not to forgo explicit transition terms

until you’ve first mastered their use. In all our years of teaching,

we’ve read countless essays that suffered from having few or no

transitions, but cannot recall one in which the transitions were

overused. Seasoned writers sometimes omit explicit transitions,

but only because they rely heavily on the other types of connect-

ing devices that we turn to in the rest of this chapter.

Before doing so, however, let us warn you about inserting

transitions without really thinking through their meanings—

using “therefore,” say, when your text’s logic actually requires

“nevertheless” or “however.” So beware. Choosing transition

terms should involve a bit of mental sweat, since the whole

point of using them is to make your writing more reader-friendly,

not less. The only thing more frustrating than reading Bill-style

passages like “Spot is a good dog. He has fleas” is reading mis-

connected sentences like “Spot is a good dog. For example, he

has fleas.”

use pointing words

Another way to connect the parts of your argument is by using

pointing words—which, as their name implies, point or refer

backward to some concept in the previous sentence. The most

common of these pointing words include “this,” “these,” “that,”

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Connecting the Parts

113

“those,” “their,” and “such” (as in “these pointing words” near

the start of this sentence) and simple pronouns like “his,” “he,”

“her,” “she,” “it,” and “their.” Such terms help you create the

flow we spoke of earlier that enables readers to move effortlessly

through your text. In a sense, these terms are like an invisible

hand reaching out of your sentence, grabbing what’s needed in

the previous sentences and pulling it along.

Like transitions, however, pointing words need to be used

carefully. It’s dangerously easy to insert pointing words into

your text that don’t refer to a clearly defined object, assuming

that because the object you have in mind is clear to you it will

also be clear to your readers. For example, consider the use of

“this” in the following passage.

Alexis de Tocqueville was highly critical of democratic societ-

ies, which he saw as tending toward mob rule. At the same time,

he accorded democratic societies grudging respect. This is seen in

Tocqueville’s statement that . . .

When “this” is used in such a way it becomes an ambiguous or

free-floating pointer, since readers can’t tell if it refers to Tocque-

ville’s critical attitude toward democratic societies, his grudging

respect for them, or some combination of both. “This what?”

readers mutter as they go back over such passages and try to

figure them out. It’s also tempting to try to cheat with pointing

words, hoping that they will conceal or make up for conceptual

confusions that may lurk in your argument. By referring to a

fuzzy idea as “this” or “that,” you might hope the fuzziness will

somehow come across as clearer than it is.

You can fix problems caused by a free-floating pointer by

making sure there is one and only one possible object in the

vicinity that the pointer could be referring to. It also often helps

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eight eight “AS A RESULT”

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to name the object the pointer is referring to at the same time

that you point to it, replacing the bald “this” in the example

above with a more precise phrase like “this ambivalence toward

democratic societies” or “this grudging respect.”

repeat key terms and phrases

A third strategy for connecting the parts of your argument is

to develop a constellation of key terms and phrases, including

their synonyms and antonyms, that you repeat throughout your

text. When used effectively, your key terms should be items

that readers could extract from your text in order to get a solid

sense of your topic. Playing with key terms also can be a good

way to come up with a title and appropriate section headings

for your text.

Notice how often Martin Luther King Jr. uses the key words

“criticism,” “statement,” “answer,” and “correspondence” in the

opening paragraph of his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

Dear Fellow Clergymen:

While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across

your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and

untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and

ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk,

my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such

correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time

for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine

good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to

try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and

reasonable terms.

Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail”

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Connecting the Parts

115

Even though King uses the terms “criticism” and “answer” three

times each and “statement” twice, the effect is not overly repeti-

tive. In fact, these key terms help build a sense of momentum

in the paragraph and bind it together.

For another example of the effective use of key terms, con-

sider the following passage, in which the historian Susan Doug-

las develops a constellation of sharply contrasting key terms

around the concept of “cultural schizophrenics”: women like

herself who, Douglas claims, have mixed feelings about the

images of ideal femininity with which they are constantly bom-

barded by the media.

In a variety of ways, the mass media helped make us the cultural

schizophrenics we are today, women who rebel against yet submit

to prevailing images about what a desirable, worthwhile woman

should be. . . . [T]he mass media has engendered in many women a

kind of cultural identity crisis. We are ambivalent toward feminin-

ity on the one hand and feminism on the other. Pulled in opposite

directions—told we were equal, yet told we were subordinate; told

we could change history but told we were trapped by history—we

got the bends at an early age, and we’ve never gotten rid of them.

When I open Vogue, for example, I am simultaneously infu-

riated and seduced. . . . I adore the materialism; I despise the

materialism. . . . I want to look beautiful; I think wanting to look

beautiful is about the most dumb-ass goal you could have. The

magazine stokes my desire; the magazine triggers my bile. And this

doesn’t only happen when I’m reading Vogue; it happens all the

time. . . . On the one hand, on the other hand—that’s not just

me—that’s what it means to be a woman in America.

To explain this schizophrenia . . .

Susan Douglas, Where the Girls Are:

Growing Up Female with the Mass Media

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eight eight “AS A RESULT”

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In this passage, Douglas establishes “schizophrenia” as a key

concept and then echoes it through synonyms like “identity

crisis,” “ambivalent,” “the bends”—and even demonstrates it

through a series of contrasting words and phrases:

rebel against / submit

told we were equal / told we were subordinate

told we could change history / told we were trapped by history

infuriated / seduced

I adore / I despise

I want / I think wanting . . . is about the most dumb-ass goal

stokes my desire / triggers my bile

on the one hand / on the other hand

These contrasting phrases help flesh out Douglas’s claim that

women are being pulled in two directions at once. In so doing,

they bind the passage together into a unified whole that, despite

its complexity and sophistication, stays focused over its entire

length.

repeat yourself—but with a difference

The last technique we offer for connecting the parts of your

text involves repeating yourself, but with a difference—which

basically means saying the same thing you’ve just said, but in

a slightly different way that avoids sounding monotonous. To

effectively connect the parts of your argument and keep it mov-

ing forward, be careful not to leap from one idea to a different

idea or introduce new ideas cold. Instead, try to build bridges

between your ideas by echoing what you’ve just said while

simultaneously moving your text into new territory.

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Connecting the Parts

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Several of the connecting devices discussed in this chapter

are ways of repeating yourself in this special way. Key terms,

pointing terms, and even many transitions can be used in a

way that not only brings something forward from the previous

sentence but in some way alters it. When Douglas, for instance,

uses the key term “ambivalent” to echo her earlier reference

to schizophrenics, she is repeating herself with a difference—

repeating the same concept, but with a different word that adds

new associations.

In addition, when you use transition phrases like “in other

words” and “to put it another way,” you repeat yourself with a

difference, since these phrases help you restate earlier claims but

in a different register. When you open a sentence with “in other

words,” you are basically telling your readers that in case they

didn’t fully understand what you meant in the last sentence,

you are now coming at it again from a slightly different angle,

or that since you’re presenting a very important idea, you’re

not going to skip over it quickly but will explore it further to

make sure your readers grasp all its aspects.

We would even go so far as to suggest that after your first

sentence, almost every sentence you write should refer back

to previous statements in some way. Whether you are writing

a “furthermore” comment that adds to what you have just said

or a “for example” statement that illustrates it, each sentence

should echo at least one element of the previous sentence in

some discernible way. Even when your text changes direction

and requires transitions like “in contrast,” “however,” or “but,”

you still need to mark that shift by linking the sentence to

the one just before it, as in the following example.

Cheyenne loved basketball. Nevertheless, she feared her height

would put her at a disadvantage.

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eight eight “AS A RESULT”

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These sentences work because even though the second sen-

tence changes course and qualifies the first, it still echoes key

concepts from the first. Not only does “she” echo “Cheyenne,”

since both refer to the same person, but “feared” echoes “loved”

by establishing the contrast mandated by the term “neverthe-

less.” “Nevertheless,” then, is not an excuse for changing sub-

jects radically. It too requires repetition to help readers shift

gears with you and follow your train of thought.

Repetition, in short, is the central means by which you can

move from point A to point B in a text. To introduce one last

analogy, think of the way experienced rock climbers move up a

steep slope. Instead of jumping or lurching from one handhold

to the next, good climbers get a secure handhold on the position

they have established before reaching for the next ledge. The

same thing applies to writing. To move smoothly from point to

point in your argument, you need to firmly ground what you say

in what you’ve already said. In this way, your writing remains

focused while simultaneously moving forward.

“But hold on,” you may be thinking. “Isn’t repetition pre-

cisely what sophisticated writers should avoid, on the grounds

that it will make their writing sound simplistic—as if they are

belaboring the obvious?” Yes and no. On the one hand, writers

certainly can run into trouble if they merely repeat themselves

and nothing more. On the other hand, repetition is key to creat-

ing continuity in writing. It is impossible to stay on track in a

piece of writing if you don’t repeat your points throughout the

length of the text. Furthermore, writers would never make an

impact on readers if they didn’t repeat their main points often

enough to reinforce those points and make them stand out above

subordinate points. The trick therefore is not to avoid repeating

yourself but to repeat yourself in varied and interesting enough

ways that you advance your argument without sounding tedious.

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Connecting the Parts

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Exercises

1. Read the following opening to Chapter 2 of The Road to

Wigan Pier, by George Orwell. Annotate the connecting

devices by underlining the transitions, circling the key

terms, and putting boxes around the pointing terms.

Our civilisation . . . is founded on coal, more completely than

one realises until one stops to think about it. The machines that

keep us alive, and the machines that make the machines, are

all directly or indirectly dependent upon coal. In the metabolism

of the Western world the coal-miner is second in importance

only to the man who ploughs the soil. He is a sort of grimy cary-

atid upon whose shoulders nearly everything that is not grimy

is supported. For this reason the actual process by which coal is

extracted is well worth watching, if you get the chance and are

willing to take the trouble.

When you go down a coal-mine it is important to try and get

to the coal face when the “fillers” are at work. This is not easy,

because when the mine is working visitors are a nuisance and

are not encouraged, but if you go at any other time, it is possible

to come away with a totally wrong impression. On a Sunday, for

instance, a mine seems almost peaceful. The time to go there

is when the machines are roaring and the air is black with coal

dust, and when you can actually see what the miners have to

do. At those times the place is like hell, or at any rate like my

own mental picture of hell. Most of the things one imagines in

hell are there—heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and,

above all, unbearably cramped space. Everything except the fire,

for there is no fire down there except the feeble beams of Davy

lamps and electric torches which scarcely penetrate the clouds

of coal dust.

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eight eight “AS A RESULT”

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When you have finally got there—and getting there is a job in

itself: I will explain that in a moment—you crawl through the last

line of pit props and see opposite you a shiny black wall three or

four feet high. This is the coal face. Overhead is the smooth ceiling

made by the rock from which the coal has been cut; underneath is

the rock again, so that the gallery you are in is only as high as the

ledge of coal itself, probably not much more than a yard. The first

impression of all, overmastering everything else for a while, is the

frightful, deafening din from the conveyor belt which carries the

coal away. You cannot see very far, because the fog of coal dust

throws back the beam of your lamp, but you can see on either side

of you the line of half-naked kneeling men, one to every four or

five yards, driving their shovels under the fallen coal and flinging

it swiftly over their left shoulders. . . .

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

2. Read over something you’ve written with an eye for the

devices you’ve used to connect the parts. Underline all

the transitions, pointing terms, key terms, and repetition.

Do you see any patterns? Do you rely on certain devices

more than others? Are there any passages that are hard to

follow—and if so, can you make them easier to read by trying

any of the other devices discussed in this chapter?

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121

NINE

“ain’t so / is not”

Academic Writing Doesn’t Always Mean

Setting Aside Your Own Voice

Have you ever gotten the impression that writing well in

college means setting aside the kind of language you use in

everyday conversation? That to impress your instructors you

need to use big words, long sentences, and complex sentence

structures? If so, then we’re here to tell you that it ain’t neces-

sarily so. On the contrary, academic writing can—and in our

view should—be relaxed, easy to follow, and even a little bit

fun. Although we don’t want to suggest that you avoid using

sophisticated, academic terms in your writing, we encourage

you to draw upon the kinds of expressions and turns of phrase

that you use every day when texting or conversing with family

and friends. In this chapter, we want to show you how you can

write effective academic arguments while holding on to some

of your own voice.

This point is important, since you may well become turned

off from writing if you think your everyday language practices

have to be checked at the classroom door. You may end up

feeling like a student we know who, when asked how she felt

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nine nine “AIN’T SO / IS NOT”

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about the writing she does in college, answered, “I do it because

I have to, but it’s just not me!”

This is not to suggest that any language you use among

friends has a place in academic writing. Nor is it to suggest

that you may fall back on colloquial usage as an excuse for not

learning more rigorous forms of expression. After all, learning

these more rigorous forms of expression and developing a more

intellectual self is a major reason for getting an education. We

do, however, wish to suggest that relaxed, colloquial language

can often enliven academic writing and even enhance its rigor

and precision. Such informal language also helps you connect

with readers in a personal as well as an intellectual way. In our

view, then, it is a mistake to assume that the academic and the

everyday are completely separate languages that can never be

used together.

mix academic and colloquial styles

Many successful writers blend academic, professional language

with popular expressions and sayings. Consider, for instance, the

following passage from a scholarly article about the way teachers

respond to errors in student writing.

Marking and judging formal and mechanical errors in student

papers is one area in which composition studies seems to have

a multiple-personality disorder. On the one hand, our mellow,

student-centered, process-based selves tend to condemn mark-

ing formal errors at all. Doing it represents the Bad Old Days.

Ms. Fidditch and Mr. Flutesnoot with sharpened red pencils, spill-

ing innocent blood across the page. Useless detail work. Inhumane,

perfectionist standards, making our students feel stupid, wrong,

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Academic Writing Doesn’t Mean Setting Aside Your Own Voice

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trivial, misunderstood. Joseph Williams has pointed out how arbi-

trary and context-bound our judgments of formal error are. And

certainly our noting of errors on student papers gives no one any

great joy; as Peter Elbow says, English is most often associated

either with grammar or with high literature—“two things designed

to make folks feel most out of it.”

Robert Connors and Andrea Lunsford,

“Frequency of Formal Errors in Current College Writing,

or Ma and Pa Kettle Do Research”

This passage blends writing styles in several ways. First, it places

informal, relaxed expressions like “mellow,” “the Bad Old

Days,” and “folks” alongside more formal, academic phrases like

“multiple-personality disorder,” “student-centered,” “process-

based,” and “arbitrary and context-bound.” Even the title of

the piece, “Frequency of Formal Errors in Current College

Writing, or Ma and Pa Kettle Do Research,” blends formal,

academic usage on the left side of the comma with a popular-

culture reference to the fictional movie characters Ma and

Pa Kettle on the right. Second, to give vivid, concrete form

to their discussion of grading disciplinarians, Connors and

Lunsford conjure up such archetypal, imaginary figures as the

stuffy, old-fashioned taskmasters Ms. Fidditch and Mr. Flutes-

noot. Through such imaginative uses of language, Connors and

Lunsford inject greater force into what might otherwise have

been dry, scholarly prose.

Formal/informal mixings like this can be found in countless

other texts, though more frequently in the humanities than the

sciences, and more frequently still in journalism. Notice how

the food industry critic Eric Schlosser describes some changes

in the city of Colorado Springs in his best-selling book on fast

foods in the United States.

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nine nine “AIN’T SO / IS NOT”

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The loopiness once associated with Los Angeles has come full

blown to Colorado Springs—the strange, creative energy that crops

up where the future’s consciously being made, where people walk

the fine line separating a visionary from a total nutcase.

Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation

Schlosser could have played it safe and referred not to the

“loopiness” but to the “eccentricity” associated with Los Ange-

les, or to “the fine line separating a visionary from a lunatic”

instead of “ . . . a total nutcase.” His decision, however, to go

with the more adventuresome, colorful terms gives a liveliness

to his writing that would have been lacking with the more

conventional terms.

Another example of writing that blends the informal with

the formal comes from an essay on the American novelist Willa

Cather by the literary critic Judith Fetterley. Discussing “how

very successful Cather has been in controlling how we think

about her,” Fetterley, building on the work of another scholar,

writes as follows.

As Merrill Skaggs has put it, “She is neurotically controlling and

self-conscious about her work, but she knows at all points what she

is doing. Above all else, she is self-conscious.”

Without question, Cather was a control freak.

Judith Fetterley, “Willa Cather and the

Question of Sympathy: The Unofficial Story”

This passage demonstrates not only that specialized phrases

from psychology like “self-conscious” and “neurotically control-

ling” are compatible with everyday, popular expressions like

“control freak,” but also that translating the one type of lan-

guage into the other, the specialized into the everyday, can help

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Academic Writing Doesn’t Mean Setting Aside Your Own Voice

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drive home a point. By translating Skaggs’s polysyllabic

description of Cather as “neurotically controlling and

self-conscious” into the succinct, if blunt, claim that

“Without question, Cather was a control freak,” Fetter-

ley suggests that one need not choose between rarified,

academic ways of talking and the everyday language of casual con-

versation. Indeed, her passage offers a simple recipe for blending

the high and the low: first make your point in the language of a

professional field, and then make it again in everyday language—a

great trick, we think, for underscoring a point.

While one effect of blending languages like this is to give your

writing more punch, another is to make a political statement—

about the way, for example, society unfairly overvalues some

dialects and devalues others. For instance, in the titles of two of

her books, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America

and Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen

Corner, the language scholar Geneva Smitherman mixes African

American vernacular phrases with more scholarly language in

order to suggest, as she explicitly argues in these books, that

black English vernacular is as legitimate a variety of language

as “standard” English. Here are three typical passages.

In Black America, the oral tradition has served as a fundamen-

tal vehicle for gittin ovuh. That tradition preserves the Afro-

American heritage and reflects the collective spirit of the race.

Blacks are quick to ridicule “educated fools,” people who done

gone to school and read all dem books and still don’t know nothin!

. . . it is a socially approved verbal strategy for black rappers to talk

about how bad they is.

Geneva Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin:

The Language of Black America

See p. 244

for an essay

that mixes

colloquial

and academic

styles.

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nine nine “AIN’T SO / IS NOT”

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In these examples, Smitherman blends the standard written

English of phrases like “oral tradition” and “fundamental vehi-

cle” with black oral vernacular like “gittin ovuh,” “dem books,”

and “how bad they is.” Indeed, she even blends standard English

spelling with that of black English variants like “dem” and

“ovuh,” thus mimicking what some black English vernacular

actually sounds like. Although some scholars might object to

these unconventional practices, this is precisely Smitherman’s

point: that our habitual language practices need to be opened

up, and that the number of participants in the academic con-

versation needs to be expanded.

Along similar lines, the writer and activist Gloria Anzaldúa

mixes standard English with Tex-Mex, a hybrid blend of

English, Castilian Spanish, a North Mexican dialect, and the

Indian language Nahuatl, to make a political point about the

suppression of the Spanish language in the United States.

From this racial, ideological, cultural, and biological cross-

pollinization, an “alien” consciousness is presently in the making—

a new mestiza consciousness, una conciencia de mujer.

Gloria Anzaldúa,

Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza

Like Smitherman, Anzaldúa gets her point across not only

through what she says but through the way she says it, liter-

ally showing that the new hybrid, or mestiza, consciousness that

she describes is, as she puts it, “presently in the making.”

Ultimately, these passages suggest that blending languages—

what Vershawn Ashanti Young calls “code meshing”—can call

into question the very idea that the languages are distinct and

separate.

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Academic Writing Doesn’t Mean Setting Aside Your Own Voice

127

when to mix styles?

consider your audience and purpose

Because there are so many options in writing, you should never

feel limited in your choice of words, as if such choices are set

in stone. You can always experiment with your language and

improve it. You can always dress it up, dress it down, or some

combination of both. In dressing down your language, for exam-

ple, you can make the claim that somebody “failed to notice”

something by saying instead that it “flew under the radar.” Or

you can state that the person was “unaware” of something by

saying that he was “out to lunch.” You could even recast the

title of this book, “They Say / I Say,” as a teenager might say it:

“She Goes / I’m Like.”

But how do you know when it is better to play things straight

and stick to standard English, and when to be more adventure-

some and mix things up? When, in other words, should you

write “failed to notice” and when is it okay (or more effective)

to write “flew under the radar”? Is it always appropriate to mix

styles? And when you do so, how do you know when enough

is enough?

In all situations, think carefully about your audience and

purpose. When you write a letter applying for a job, for instance,

or submit a grant proposal, where your words will be weighed by

an official screening body, using language that’s too colloquial

or slangy may well jeopardize your chances of success. On such

occasions, it is usually best to err on the safe side, conforming

as closely as possible to the conventions of standard written

English. In other situations for other audiences, however, there

is room to be more creative—in this book, for example. Ulti-

mately, your judgments about the appropriate language for the

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nine nine “AIN’T SO / IS NOT”

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situation should always take into account your likely audience

and your purpose in writing.

Although it may have been in the past, academic writing in

most disciplines today is no longer the linguistic equivalent of a

black-tie affair. To succeed as a writer in college, then, you need

not always limit your language to the strictly formal. Although

academic writing does rely on complex sentence patterns and

on specialized, disciplinary vocabularies, it is surprising how

often such writing draws on the languages of the street, popular

culture, our ethnic communities, and home. It is by blending

these languages that what counts as “standard” En glish changes

over time and the range of possibilities open to academic writers

continues to grow.

Exercises

1. Take a paragraph from this book and dress it down, rewrit-

ing it in informal colloquial language. Then rewrite the same

paragraph again by dressing it up, making it much more for-

mal. Then rewrite the paragraph one more time in a way that

blends the two styles. Share your paragraphs with a classmate,

and discuss which versions are most effective and why.

2. Find something you’ve written for a course, and study it to see

whether you’ve used any of your own everyday expressions,

any words or structures that are not “academic.” If by chance

you don’t find any, see if there’s a place or two where shifting

into more casual or unexpected language would help you make

a point, get your reader’s attention, or just add liveliness to

your text. Be sure to keep your audience and purpose in mind,

and use language that will be appropriate to both.

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129

TEN

“but don’t get me wrong”

The Art of Metacommentary

When we tell people that we are writing a chapter on the

art of metacommentary, they often give us a puzzled look and

tell us that they have no idea what “metacommen tary” is. “We

know what commentary is,” they’ll sometimes say, “but what

does it mean when it’s meta?” Our answer is that whether or

not they know the term, they practice the art of metacommen-

tary on a daily basis whenever they make a point of explain-

ing something they’ve said or written: “What I meant to say

was ,” “My point was not , but ,”

or “You’re probably not going to like what I’m about to say,

but .” In such cases, they are not offering new points

but telling an audience how to interpret what they have already

said or are about to say. In short, then, metacommentary is a

way of commenting on your claims and telling others how—and

how not—to think about them.

It may help to think of metacommentary as being like

the chorus in a Greek play that stands to the side of the

drama unfolding on the stage and explains its meaning to the

audience—or like a voice-over narrator who comments on

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t e n ten “BUT DON’T GET ME WRONG”

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and explains the action in a television show or movie. Think

of metacommentary as a sort of second text that stands along-

side your main text and explains what it means. In the main

text you say something; in the metatext you guide your readers

in interpreting and processing what you’ve said.

What we are suggesting, then, is that you think of your text

as two texts joined at the hip: a main text in which you make

your argument and another in which you “work” your ideas,

distinguishing your views from others they may be confused

with, anticipating and answering objections, connecting one

point to another, explaining why your claim might be contro-

versial, and so forth. The figure below demonstrates what we

mean.

ALL

WRITING IS

CONVERSATIONAL.

THE MAIN TEXT SAYS SOMETHING, THE

METATEXT TELLS READERS HO

W—A

W — A

ND HOW

T—T

T — T

O THINK ABOUT IT.

NOW, DON’T GET ME

WRONG. I’M

SAYING...

NOT

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The Art of Metacommentary

131

use metacommentary to clarify

and elaborate

But why do you need metacommentary to tell readers what you

mean and guide them through your text? Can’t you just clearly

say what you mean up front? The answer is that, no matter

how clear and precise your writing is, readers can still fail to

understand it in any number of ways. Even the best writers

can provoke reactions in readers that they didn’t intend, and

even good readers can get lost in a complicated argument or

fail to see how one point connects with another. Readers may

also fail to see what follows from your argument, or they may

follow your reasoning and examples yet fail to see the larger

conclusion you draw from them. They may fail to see your

argument’s overall significance, or mistake what you are saying

for a related argument that they have heard before but that

you want to distance yourself from. As a result, no matter how

straightforward a writer you are, readers still need you to help

them grasp what you really mean. Because the written word is

prone to so much mischief and can be interpreted in so many

different ways, we need metacommentary to keep misinterpre-

tations and other communication misfires at bay.

Another reason to master the art of metacommentary is that

it will help you develop your ideas and generate more text. If you

have ever had trouble producing the required number of pages

for a writing project, metacommentary can help you add both

length and depth to your writing. We’ve seen many students

who try to produce a five-page paper sputter to a halt at two or

three pages, complaining they’ve said everything they can think

of about their topic. “I’ve stated my thesis and presented my

reasons and evidence,” students have told us. “What else is there

to do?” It’s almost as if such writers have generated a thesis and

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t e n ten “BUT DON’T GET ME WRONG”

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don’t know what to do with it. When these students learn to use

metacommentary, however, they get more out of their ideas and

write longer, more substantial texts. In sum, metacommentary

can help you extract the full potential from your ideas, draw-

ing out important implications, explaining ideas from different

perspectives, and so forth.

So even when you may think you’ve said everything pos-

sible in an argument, try inserting the following types of

metacommentary.

j In other words, she doesn’t realize how right she is.

j What really means is .

j My point is not but .

j Ultimately, then, my goal is to demonstrate that .

Ideally, such metacommentary should help you recognize some

implications of your ideas that you didn’t initially realize were

there.

Let’s look at how the cultural critic Neil Postman uses meta-

commentary in the following passage describing the shift in

American culture when it began to move from print and read-

ing to television and movies.

It is my intention in this book to show that a great . . . shift has

taken place in America, with the result that the content of much

of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense. With this

in view, my task in the chapters ahead is straightforward. I must,

first, demonstrate how, under the governance of the printing

press, discourse in America was different from what it is now—

generally coherent, serious and rational; and then how, under the

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The Art of Metacommentary

133

governance of television, it has become shriveled and absurd.

But to avoid the possibility that my analysis will be interpreted as

standard-brand academic whimpering, a kind of elitist complaint

against “junk” on television, I must first explain that . . . I appreci-

ate junk as much as the next fellow, and I know full well that the

printing press has generated enough of it to fill the Grand Canyon

to overflowing. Television is not old enough to have matched

printing’s output of junk.

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death:

Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

To see what we mean by metacommentary, look at the phrases

above that we have italicized. With these moves, Postman

essentially stands apart from his main ideas to help readers

follow and understand what he is arguing.

He previews what he will argue: It is my intention in this book

to show . . .

He spells out how he will make his argument: With this in

view, my task in these chapters . . . is. . . . I must, first, dem-

onstrate . . . and then . . .

He distinguishes his argument from other arguments it may

easily be confused with: But to avoid the possibility that my

analysis will be interpreted as . . . I must first explain that . . .

titles as metacommentary

Even the title of Postman’s book, Amusing Ourselves to Death:

Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, functions as a form

of metacommentary since, like all titles, it stands apart from

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t e n ten “BUT DON’T GET ME WRONG”

134

the text itself and tells readers the book’s main point: that

the very pleasure provided by contemporary show business is

destructive.

Titles, in fact, are one of the most important forms of

metacommentary, functioning rather like carnival barkers

telling passersby what they can expect if they go inside. Sub-

titles, too, function as metacommentary, further explaining

or elaborating on the main title. The subtitle of this book,

for example, not only explains that it is about “the moves

that matter in academic writing,” but indicates that “they

say / I say” is one of these moves. Thinking of a title as

metacommentary can actually help you develop sharper

titles, ones that, like Postman’s, give readers a hint of what

your argument will be. Contrast such titles with unhelpfully

open-ended ones like “Shakespeare” or “Steroids” or “English

Essay,” or essays with no titles at all. Essays with vague titles

(or no titles) send the message that the writer has simply

not bothered to reflect on what he or she is saying and is

uninterested in guiding or orienting readers.

use other moves as metacommentary

Many of the other moves covered in this book function as

metacommentary: entertaining objections, adding transitions,

framing quotations, answering “so what?” and “who cares?”

When you entertain objections, you stand outside of your text

and imagine what a critic might say; when you add transitions,

you essentially explain the relationship between various claims.

And when you answer the “so what?” and “who cares?” ques-

tions, you look beyond your central argument and explain who

should be interested in it and why.

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The Art of Metacommentary

135

templates for introducing

metacommentary

to ward off potential misunderstandings

The following moves help you differentiate certain views from

ones they might be mistaken for.

j Essentially, I am arguing not that we should give up the policy,

but that we should monitor effects far more closely.

j This is not to say , but rather .

j X is concerned less with than with .

to elaborate on a previous idea

The following moves elaborate on a previous point, saying to

readers: “In case you didn’t get it the first time, I’ll try saying

the same thing in a different way.”

j In other words, .

j To put it another way, .

j What X is saying here is that .

to provide a roadmap to your text

This move orients readers, clarifying where you have been and

where you are going—and making it easier for them to process

and follow your text.

j Chapter 2 explores , while Chapter 3 examines

j Having just argued that , I want now to complicate the

point by .

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t e n ten “BUT DON’T GET ME WRONG”

136

to move from a general claim to a specific example

These moves help you explain a general point by providing a

concrete example that illustrates what you’re saying.

j For example, .

j , for instance, demonstrates .

j Consider , for example.

j To take a case in point, .

to indicate that a claim is more, less, or equally important

The following templates help you give relative emphasis to the

claim that you are introducing, showing whether that claim is

of more or less weight than the previous one, or equal to it.

j Even more important, .

j But above all, .

j Incidentally, we will briefly note, .

j Just as important, .

j Equally, .

j Finally, .

to explain a claim when you anticipate objections

Here’s a template to help you anticipate and respond to pos-

sible objections.

j Although some readers may object that , I would

answer that .

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The Art of Metacommentary

137

to guide readers to your most general point

These moves show that you are wrapping things up and

tying up various subpoints previously made.

j In sum, then, .

j My conclusion, then, is that .

j In short, .

In this chapter we have tried to show that the most persuasive

writing often doubles back and comments on its own claims in

ways that help readers negotiate and process them. Instead of

simply piling claim upon claim, effective writers are constantly

“stage managing” how their claims will be recieved. It’s true of

course that to be persuasive a text has to have strong claims

to argue in the first place. But even the strongest arguments

will flounder unless writers use metacommentary to prevent

potential misreadings and make their arguments shine.

Exercises

1. Read an essay or article and annotate it to indicate the

different ways the author uses metacommentary. Use the

templates on pp. 135–37 as your guide. For example, you

may want to circle transitional phrases and write “trans” in

the margins, to put brackets around sentences that elaborate

on earlier sentences and mark them “elab,” or underline

sentences in which the author sums up what he or she has

been saying, writing “sum” in the margins.

How does the author use metacommentary? Does the

author follow any of the templates provided in this book

Chapter 6

has more

templates for

anticipating

objections.

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t e n ten “BUT DON’T GET ME WRONG”

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word for word? Did you find any forms of metacommentary

not discussed in this chapter? If so, can you identify them,

name them, and perhaps devise templates based on them for

use in your own writing? And finally, how do you think the

author’s use of metacommentary enhances (or harms) his or

her writing?

2. Complete each of the following metacommentary templates

in any way that makes sense.

j In making a case for the medical use of marijuana, I am not

saying that .

j But my argument will do more than prove that one particular

industrial chemical has certain toxic properties. In this article,

I will also .

j My point about the national obsessions with sports reinforces

the belief held by many that .

j I believe, therefore, that the war is completely unjustified.

But let me back up and explain how I arrived at this conclu-

sion: . In this way, I came to believe that this war is

a big mistake.

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139

ELEVEN

“he says contends”

Using the Templates to Revise

One of the most important stages of the writing process

is revision, when you look at a draft with an eye for how well

you’ve made your argument and what you need to do make it

better. The challenge is to figure out what needs work—and

then what exactly you need to do.

Sometimes you’ll have specific comments and suggestions

from a teacher, noting that you need to state your position more

explicitly, that your point is unclear, that you’ve misunderstood

an author you’re summarizing, and so forth. But what if you

don’t have any such guidance, or aren’t sure what to do with

it? The list of guidelines below offers help and points you back

to relevant advice and templates in this book.

Do you present your argument as a response to what others

say? Do you make reference to other views besides your own? Do

you use voice markers to distinguish clearly for readers between

your views and those of others? In order to make your argument

as convincing as possible, would it help to add more concessions

to opposing views, using “yes but” templates?

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140

eleven eleven “HE SAYS CONTENDS”

Asking yourself these large-scale revision questions will

help you see how well you’ve managed the “they say / I say”

framework and this in turn should help you see where further

revisions are needed. The checklist below follows the order of

chapters in this book.

How Do You Represent What Others Say?

Do you start with what others say? If not, try revising to do so.

See pp. 23–26 for templates that can help.

Do you summarize or paraphrase what they’ve said? If so, have you

represented their views accurately—and adequately?

Do you quote others? Do you frame each quotation successfully,

integrating it into your text? Does the quotation support your

argument? Have you introduced each quotation adequately,

naming the person you’re quoting (and saying who that per-

son is if your readers won’t know)? Do you explain in your own

words what the quotation means? Do you then clearly indicate

how the quotation bears on your own argument? See pp. 44–46

for tips on creating a “quotation sandwich.”

Check the verbs you use to introduce any summaries and quo-

tations: do they express accurately what was said? If you’ve

used common signal phrases such as “X said” or “Y believes,”

is there a verb that reflects more accurately what was said?

See pp. 39–40 for a list of verbs for introducing summaries

and quotations.

Have you documented all summaries and quotations, both with

parenthetical documentation in your text and a references or

works cited list?

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141

Using the Templates to Revise

Do you remind readers of what others say at various points

throughout your text? If not, see pp. 27–28 for help revising

in order to do so.

What Do You Say?

Do you agree, disagree, or both with those you’re responding to?

Have you said so explicitly?

If you disagree, do you give reasons why you disagree? If you

agree, what more have you added to the conversation? If you

both agree and disagree, do you do so without confusing readers

or seeming evasive?

Have you stated your position and the one it responds to as a

connected unit?

What reasons and evidence do you offer to support your “I say”?

In other words, do your argument and the argument you are

responding to—your “I say” and “they say”—address the same

topic or issue, or does a switch occur that takes you on a tan-

gent that will confuse readers? One way to ensure that your

“I say” and “they say” are aligned rather than seeming like ships

passing in the night is to use the same key terms in both. See

Chapter 8 for tips on how to do so.

Will readers be able to distinguish what you say from what

others say? See Chapter 5 for advice about using voice

markers to make that distinction clear, especially at moments

when you are moving from your view to someone else’s view

or back.

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142

eleven eleven “HE SAYS CONTENDS”

Have You Introduced Any Naysayers?

Have you acknowledged likely objections to your argument?

If so, have you represented these views fairly—and responded

to them persuasively? See Chapter 6 for tips on how to do so.

If not, think about what other perspectives exist on your topic,

and incorporate them into your draft.

Have You Used Metacommentary to Clarify What You

Do or Don’t Mean?

No matter how clearly you’ve explained your points, it’s a good

idea to explain what you mean—or don’t mean—with phrases

like “in other words” or “don’t get me wrong.” See Chapter 10

for examples of how to do so.

Do you have a title? If so, does it tell readers what your main

point or issue is, and does it do so in a lively manner? Should

you add a subtitle to elaborate on the title?

Have You Tied It All Together?

Can readers follow your argument from one sentence and para-

graph to the next and see how each successive point supports

your overall argument?

Check your use of transitions, words like “however” and “therefore.”

Such words make clear how your ideas relate to one another; if

you need to add transitions, see pp.109–10 for a complete list.

Check your use of pointing words. Do you use common pointers

like “this” and “that,” which help lead readers from one sentence

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143

Using the Templates to Revise

to the next? If so, is it always clear what “this” and “that” refer

to, or do you need to add nouns in order to avoid ambiguity?

See pp. 112–14 for help working with pointing words.

Have you used what we call “repetition with a difference” to help

connect parts of your argument? See pp. 114–18 for examples

of how to do so.

Have You Shown Why Your Argument Matters?

Don’t assume that readers will see why your argument is

important—or why they should care. Be sure that you have

told them why. See Chapter 7 if you need help.

a revised student essay

Here is an example of how one student, Antonia Peacocke,

used this book to revise an essay. Starting with an article she’d

written for her high school newspaper, Peacocke then followed

the advice in our book as she turned her article into a college

level academic essay. Her original article was a brief account of

why she liked Family Guy, and her first step in revising was to

open with a “they say” and an “I say,” previewing her overall

argument in brief form at the essay’s beginning. While her

original version had acknowledged that many find the show

“objectionable,” she hadn’t named these people or indicated

why they didn’t like the show. In her revised version, after

doing further research, Peacocke identified those with whom

she disagreed and responded to them at length, as the essay

itself illustrates.

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144

eleven eleven “HE SAYS CONTENDS”

In addition, Peacocke strengthened existing transitions,

added new ones, and clarified the stakes of her argument, saying

more explicitly why readers should care about whether Family

Guy is good or bad. In making these revisions she gave her own

spin to several templates in this book.

We’ve annotated Peacocke’s essay in the margins to point

out particular rhetorical moves discussed in our book and the

chapters in which those discussions appear. We hope studying

her essay and our annotations will suggest how you might craft

and revise your own writing.

Antonia Peacocke wrote this essay in the summer between

high school and her first year at Harvard. She is now a

PhD student in philosophy at the University of California at

Berkeley.

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Using the Templates to Revise

145

Family Guy and Freud: Jokes and

Their Relation to the Unconscious

antonia peacocke

While slouching in front of the television after a

long day, you probably don’t think a lot about famous

psychologists of the twentieth century. Somehow, these

figures don’t come up often in prime-time—or even

daytime—TV programming. Whether you’re watching

Living Lohan or the NewsHour, the likelihood is that you

are not thinking of Sigmund Freud, even if you’ve heard

of his book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.

I say that you should be.

What made me think of Freud in the first place,

actually, was Family Guy, the cartoon created by Seth

MacFarlane. (Seriously—stay with me here.) Any of

my friends can tell you that this program holds endless

fascination for me; as a matter of fact, my high school

rag-sheet “perfect mate” was the baby Stewie Griffin, a

character on the show (see Fig. 1). Embarrassingly enough,

I have almost reached the point at which I can perform

Responds to

what they say

(Chapter 4)

Metacomment-

ary wards

off potential

skepticism

(Chapter 10)

Starts with

what others

are saying

(Chapter 1)

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eleven eleven “HE SAYS CONTENDS”

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one-woman versions of several episodes. I know every

website that streams the show for free, and I still refuse to

return the five Family Guy DVDs a friend lent me in 2006.

Before I was such a devotee, however, I was adamantly

opposed to the program for its particular brand of humor.

It will come as no surprise that I was not alone in this

view; many still denounce Family Guy as bigoted and crude.

New York Times journalist Stuart Elliott claimed just this

year that “the characters on the Fox television series Family

Guy . . . purposely offen[d] just about every group of people

Quotes and

summarizes

what others

say (Chapters

2 and 3)

Fig 1. Peter and Stewie Griffin (Everett Collection)

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Using the Templates to Revise

147

you could name.” Likewise Stephen Dubner, co-author of

Freakonomics, called Family Guy “a cartoon comedy that

packs more gags per minute about race, sex, incest, bestiality,

etc. than any other show [he] can think of.” Comparing its

level of offense to that of Don Imus’s infamous comments

about the Rutgers women’s basketball team in the same year,

comments that threw the popular CBS radio talk-show host

off the air, Dubner said he wondered why Imus couldn’t get

away with as much as Family Guy could.

Dubner did not know about all the trouble Family Guy

has had. In fact, it must be one of the few television shows

in history that has been canceled not just once, but twice.

After its premiere in April 1999, the show ran until August

2000, but was besieged by so many complaints, some of

them from MacFarlane’s old high school headmaster, Rev.

Richardson W. Schell, that Fox shelved it until July 2001

(Weinraub). Still afraid of causing a commotion, though,

Fox had the cartoon censored and irregularly scheduled;

as a result, its ratings fell so low that 2002 saw its second

cancellation (Weinraub). But then it came back with a

vengeance—I’ll get into that later.

Family Guy has found trouble more recently, too. In

2007, comedian Carol Burnett sued Fox for 6 million dol-

lars, claiming that the show’s parody of the Charwoman,

a character that she had created for The Carol Burnett

Show, not only violated copyright but also besmirched the

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character’s name in revenge for Burnett’s refusal to grant

permission to use her theme song (“Carol Burnett Sues

over Family Guy Parody”). The suit came after MacFarlane

had made the Charwoman into a cleaning woman for a

pornography store in one episode of Family Guy. Burnett

lost, but U.S. district judge Dean Pregerson agreed that he

could “fully appreciate how distasteful and offensive the

segment [was] to Ms. Burnett” (qtd. in Grossberg).

I must admit, I can see how parts of the show might

seem offensive if taken at face value. Look, for example,

at the mock fifties instructional video that features in the

episode “I Am Peter, Hear Me Roar.”

[The screen becomes black and white. Vapid music

plays in the background. The screen reads “WOMEN IN

THE WORKPLACE ca. 1956,” then switches to a shot of

an office with various women working on typewriters.

A businessman speaks to the camera.]

businessman : Irrational and emotionally fragile by

nature, female coworkers are a peculiar animal. They

are very insecure about their appearance. Be sure to

tell them how good they look every day, even if they’re

homely and unkempt. [He turns to an unattractive female

typist.] You’re doing a great job, Muriel, and you’re

prettier than Mamie van Doren! [She smiles. He grins

at the camera, raising one eyebrow knowingly, and winks.]

Represents

a naysayer’s

objections

fairly

(Chapter 6)

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Using the Templates to Revise

149

And remember, nothing says “Good job!” like a firm

open-palm slap on the behind. [He walks past a woman

bent over a file cabinet and demonstrates enthusiastically.

She smiles, looking flattered. He grins at the camera again

as the music comes to an end.]

Laughing at something so blatantly sexist could cause

anyone a pang of guilt, and before I thought more about

the show this seemed to be a huge problem. I agreed with

Dubner, and I failed to see how anyone could laugh at such

jokes without feeling at least slightly ashamed.

Soon, though, I found myself forced to give Family Guy

a chance. It was simply everywhere: my brother and many of

my friends watched it religiously, and its devoted fans relent-

lessly proselytized for it. In case you have any doubts about

its immense popularity, consider these facts. On Facebook,

the universal forum for my generation, there are currently

23 separate Family Guy fan groups with a combined member-

ship of 1,669 people (compared with only 6 groups protesting

against Family Guy, with 105 members total). Users of the

well-respected Internet Movie Database rate the show 8.8

out of 10. The box-set DVDs were the best-selling television

DVDs of 2003 in the United States (Moloney). Among the

public and within the industry, the show receives fantastic

acclaim; it has won eight awards, including three prime-

time Emmys (IMDb). Most importantly, each time it was

cancelled fans provided the brute force necessary to get it

Agrees,

but with a

difference

(Chapter 4)

Anticipates

a naysayer’s

skepticism

(Chapter 6)

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back on the air. In 2000, online campaigns did the trick; in

2002, devotees demonstrated outside Fox Studios, refused to

watch the Fox network, and boycotted any companies that

advertised on it (Moloney). Given the show’s high profile,

both with my friends and family and in the world at large, it

would have been more work for me to avoid the Griffin fam-

ily than to let myself sink into their animated world.

With more exposure, I found myself crafting a more pos-

itive view of Family Guy. Those who don’t often watch the

program, as Dubner admits he doesn’t, could easily come to

think that the cartoon takes pleasure in controversial humor

just for its own sake. But those who pay more attention and

think about the creators’ intentions can see that Family Guy

intelligently satirizes some aspects of American culture.

Some of this satire is actually quite obvious. Take, for

instance, a quip Brian the dog makes about Stewie’s liter-

ary choices in a fourth-season episode, “PTV.” (Never mind

that a dog and a baby can both read and hold lengthy

conversations.)

[The Griffins are in their car. Brian turns to Stewie, who

sits reading in his car seat.]

brian : East of Eden? So you, you, you pretty much do

whatever Oprah tells you to, huh?

stewie : You know, this book’s been around for fifty

years. It’s a classic.

Distinguishes

between what

others say and

what she says

(Chapter 5)

Mixes

academic and

colloquial

styles

(Chapter 9)

Uses a

quotation

sandwich

to explicate

this excerpt

(Chapter 3)

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151

brian : But you just got it last week. And there’s a giant

Oprah sticker on the front.

stewie : Oh—oh—oh, is that what that is? Oh, lemme

just peel that right off,

brian : So, uh, what are you gonna read after that one?

stewie : Well, she hasn’t told us yet—damn!

Brian and Stewie demonstrate insightfully and comically

how Americans are willing to follow the instructions of a

celebrity blindly—and less willing to admit that they are

doing so.

The more off-color jokes, though, those that give

Family Guy a bad name, attract a different kind of viewer.

Such viewers are not “rats in a behaviorist’s maze,” as

Slate writer Dana Stevens labels modern American televi-

sion consumers in her article “Thinking Outside the Idiot

Box.” They are conscious and critical viewers, akin to the

“screenagers” identified by Douglas Rushkoff in an essay

entitled “Bart Simpson: Prince of Irreverence” (294). They

are not—and this I cannot stress enough, self-serving as it

may seem—immoral or easily manipulated people.

Rushkoff’s piece analyzes the humor of The Simpsons, a

show criticized for many of the same reasons as Family Guy.

“The people I call ‘screenagers,’ ” Rushkoff explains, “. . .

speak the media language better than their parents do and

they see through clumsy attempts to program them into

submission” (294). He claims that gaming technology has

Distinguishes

what others

say from what

she says

(Chapter 5)

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made my generation realize that television is programmed

for us with certain intentions; since we can control

characters in the virtual world, we are more aware that

characters on TV are similarly controlled. “Sure, [these

‘screenagers’] might sit back and watch a program now and

again,” Rushkoff explains, “but they do so voluntarily, and

with full knowledge of their complicity. It is not an invol-

untary surrender” (294). In his opinion, our critical eyes

and our unwillingness to be programmed by the program-

mers make for an entirely new relationship with the shows

we watch. Thus we enjoy The Simpsons’ parodies of mass

media culture since we are skeptical of it ourselves.

Rushkoff’s argument about The Simpsons actually

applies to Family Guy as well, except in one dimen-

sion: Rushkoff writes that The Simpsons’ creators do “not

comment on social issues as much as they [do on] the

media imagery around a particular social issue” (296).

MacFarlane and company seem to do the reverse. Trusting

in their viewers’ ability to analyze what they are watch-

ing, the creators of Family Guy point out the weaknesses

and defects of U.S. society in a mocking and sometimes

intolerant way.

Taken in this light, the “instructional video” quoted

above becomes not only funny but also insightful. In its sat-

ire, viewers can recognize the sickly sweet and falsely sensi-

tive sexism of the 1950s in observing just how conveniently

Uses

transitions

to connect

the parts

(Chapter 8)

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Using the Templates to Revise

153

self-serving the speaker of the video appears. The message

of the clip denounces and ridicules sexism rather than

condoning it. It is an excerpt that perfectly exemplifies the

bold-faced candor of the show, from which it derives a lot of

its appeal.

Making such comically outrageous remarks on the air

also serves to expose certain prejudiced attitudes as outra-

geous themselves. Taking these comments at face value

would be as foolish as taking Jonathan Swift’s “Modest

Proposal” seriously. Furthermore, while they put bigoted

words into the mouths of their characters, the show’s

writers cannot be accused of portraying these characters

positively. Peter Griffin, the “family guy” of the show’s

title, probably says and does the most offensive things of

all—but as a lazy, overweight, and insensitive failure of a

man, he is hardly presented as someone to admire. Nobody

in his or her right mind would observe Peter’s behavior and

deem it worth emulation.

Family Guy has its own responses to accusations

of crudity. In the episode “PTV,” Peter sets up his own

television station broadcasting from home and the Griffin

family finds itself confronting the Federal Communications

Commission directly (see Fig. 2 for a picture of the whole

family). The episode makes many tongue-in-cheek jabs

at the FCC, some of which are sung in a rousing musical

number, but also sneaks in some of the creator’s own

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opinions. The plot comes to a climax when the FCC

begins to censor “real life” in the town of Quahog; officials

place black censor bars in front of newly showered Griffins

and blow foghorns whenever characters curse. MacFarlane

makes an important point: that no amount of television

censorship will ever change the harsh nature of reality—

and to censor reality is mere folly. Likewise, he puts explicit

arguments about censorship into lines spoken by his

Fig 2. The Griffin family watches TV. (Everett Collection)

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155

characters, as when Brian says that “responsibility lies with

the parents [and] there are plenty of things that are much

worse for children than television.”

It must be said too that not all of Family Guy’s humor

could be construed as offensive. Some of its jokes are more

tame and insightful, the kind you might expect from the

New Yorker. The following light commentary on the useful-

ness of high school algebra from “When You Wish Upon a

Weinstein” could hardly be accused of upsetting anyone—

except, perhaps, a few high school math teachers.

[Shot of Peter on the couch and his son Chris lying at his

feet and doing homework.]

chris : Dad, can you help me with my math? [My

teacher] says if I don’t learn it, I won’t be able to func-

tion in the real world.

[Shot of Chris standing holding a map in a run-down gas

station next to an attendant in overalls and a trucker cap

reading “PUMP THIS.” The attendant speaks with a

Southern accent and gestures casually to show the different

road configurations.]

attendant : Okay, now what you gotta do is go down

the road past the old Johnson place, and you’re gonna

find two roads, one parallel and one perpendicular.

Now keep going until you come to a highway that

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bisects it at a 45-degree angle. [Crosses his arms.] Solve

for x.

[Shot of Chris lying on the ground next to the attendant in

fetal position, sucking his thumb. His map lies abandoned

near him.]

In fact, Family Guy does not aim to hurt, and its creators

take certain measures to keep it from hitting too hard.

In an interview on Access Hollywood, Seth MacFarlane

plainly states that there are certain jokes too upsetting to

certain groups to go on the air. Similarly, to ensure that

the easily misunderstood show doesn’t fall into the hands

of those too young to understand it, Fox will not license

Family Guy rights to any products intended for children

under the age of fourteen (Elliott).

However, this is not to say that MacFarlane’s mission

is corrective or noble. It is worth remembering that he

wants only to amuse, a goal for which he was criticized

by several of his professors at the Rhode Island School of

Design (Weinraub). For this reason, his humor can be dan-

gerous. On the one hand, I don’t agree with George Will’s

reductive and generalized statement in his article “Reality

Television: Oxymoron” that “entertainment seeking a mass

audience is ratcheting up the violence, sexuality, and deg-

radation, becoming increasingly coarse and trying to be . . .

shocking in an unshockable society.” I believe Family Guy

Uses

transitions

to connect

the parts

(Chapter 8)

Agrees and

disagrees;

makes

concessions

while standing

her ground

(Chapters 4

and 6)

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157

has its intelligent points, and some of its seemingly “coarse”

scenes often have hidden merit. I must concede, though,

that a few of the show’s scenes seem to be doing just what

Will claims; sometimes the creators do seem to cross—or,

perhaps, eagerly race past—the line of indecency. In one

such crude scene, an elderly dog slowly races a paraplegic

and Peter, who has just been hit by a car, to get to a sev-

ered finger belonging to Peter himself (“Whistle While

Your Wife Works”). Nor do I find it particularly funny

when Stewie physically abuses Brian in a bloody fight over

gambling money (“Patriot Games”).

Thus, while Family Guy can provide a sort of relief by

breaking down taboos, we must still wonder whether or not

these taboos exist for a reason. An excess of offensive jokes,

especially those that are often misconstrued, can seem to

grant tacit permission to think offensively if it’s done for

comedy— and laughing at others’ expense can be cruel,

no matter how funny. Jokes all have their origins, and the

funniest ones are those that hit home the hardest; if we

listen to Freud, these are the ones that let our animalistic

and aggressive impulses surface from the unconscious. The

distinction between a shamelessly candid but insightful joke

and a merely shameless joke is a slight but important one.

While I love Family Guy as much as any fan, it’s important

not to lose sight of what’s truly unfunny in real life—even

as we appreciate what is hilarious in fiction.

Concludes by

showing who

cares and why

her argument

matters

(Chapter 7)

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Works Cited

“Carol Burnett Sues over Family Guy Parody.” CBC.com.

Canadian Broadcasting Centre, 16 Mar. 2007. Web.

14 July 2008.

Dubner, Stephen J. “Why Is Family Guy Okay When Imus

Wasn’t?” Web log post. Freakonomics: The Hidden

Side of Everything, 3 Dec. 2007. Web. 14 July 2008.

Elliott, Stuart. “Crude? So What? These Characters Still

Find Work in Ads.” New York Times. New York

Times, 18 June 2008. Web. 14 July 2008.

Facebook. Search for Family Guy under “Groups.” 14 July

2008.

Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the

Unconscious. 1905. Trans. James Strachey. New York:

Norton, 1989. Print.

Grossberg, Josh. “Carol Burnett Can’t Stop Stewie.”

E! Online. E! Entertainment Television, 5 June 2007.

Web. 14 Jul. 2008.

“I Am Peter, Hear Me Roar.” Family Guy. Prod. Seth

MacFarlane. Twentieth Century Fox. 28 Mar. 2000.

Web. 14 July 2008.

Internet Movie Database. Family Guy. Ed. unknown. Last

update date unknown. Web. 14 July 2008.

MacFarlane, Seth. Interview. Access Hollywood. Online

posting on YouTube. 8 May 2007. Web. 14 July 2008.

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Using the Templates to Revise

159

Moloney, Ben Adam. “Family Guy—T he TV Series.”

British Broadcasting Corporation. 30 Sept. 2004.

Web. 14 Jul. 2008.

“Patriot Games.” Family Guy. Prod. Seth MacFarlane. Twen-

tieth Century Fox. 29 Jan. 2006. Web. 22 July 2008.

“PTV.” Family Guy. Prod. Seth MacFarlane. Twentieth

Century Fox. 6 Nov. 2005. Web. 14 July 2008.

Rushkoff, Douglas. “Bart Simpson: Prince of Irreverence.”

Leaving Springfield: The Simpsons and the Possibility

of Oppositional Culture. Ed. John Alberti. Detroit:

Wayne State UP, 2004. 292–301. Print.

Stevens, Dana. “Thinking Outside the Idiot Box.” Slate.

Slate, 25 Mar. 2005. Web. 14 Jul. 2008.

Weinraub, Bernard. “The Young Guy of ‘Family Guy’:

A 30-Year-Old’s Cartoon Hit Makes an Unexpected

Comeback.” New York Times. New York Times, 7 Jul.

2004. Web. 14 July 2008.

“When You Wish Upon a Weinstein.” Family Guy. Prod.

Seth MacFarlane. Twentieth Century Fox. 9 Nov.

2003. Web. 22 July 2008.

“Whistle While Your Wife Works.” Family Guy. Prod. Seth

MacFarlane. Twentieth Century Fox. 12 Nov. 2006.

Web. 14 July 2008.

Will, George F. “Reality Television: Oxymoron.”

Washington Post 21 June 2001: A25. Print.

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IN SPECIFIC

ACADEMIC CONTEXTS

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163

TWELVE

“i take your point”

Entering Class Discussions

Have you ever been in a class discussion that feels less like

a genuine meeting of the minds than like a series of discrete,

disconnected monologues? You make a comment, say, that

seems provocative to you, but the classmate who speaks after

you makes no reference to what you said, instead going off in

an entirely different direction. Then, the classmate who speaks

next makes no reference either to you or to any one else, making

it seem as if everyone in the conversation is more interested in

their own ideas than in actually conversing with anyone else.

We like to think that the principles this book advances can

help improve class discussions, which increasingly include various

forms of online communication. Particularly important for class

discussion is the point that our own ideas become more cogent

and powerful the more responsive we are to others, and the more

we frame our claims not in isolation but as responses to what

others before us have said. Ultimately, then, a good face-to-face

classroom discussion (or online communication) doesn’t just hap-

pen spontaneously. It requires the same sorts of disciplined moves

and practices used in many writing situations, particularly that of

identifying to what and to whom you are responding.

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twelve twelve “I TAKE YOUR POINT”

164

frame your comments as a response

to something that has already been said

The single most important thing you need to do when joining a

class discussion is to link what you are about to say to something

that has already been said.

j I really liked Aaron’s point about the two sides being closer than

they seem. I’d add that both seem rather moderate.

j I take your point, Nadia, that . Still . . .

j Though Sheila and Ryan seem to be at odds about ,

they may actually not be all that far apart.

In framing your comments this way, it is usually best to name

both the person and the idea you’re responding to. If you name

the person alone (“I agree with Aaron because ”),

it may not be clear to listeners what part of what Aaron

said you are referring to. Conversely, if you only summa-

rize what Aaron said without naming him, you’ll probably

leave your classmates wondering whose comments you’re

referring to.

But won’t you sound stilted and deeply redundant in

class if you try to restate the point your classmate just made?

After all, in the case of the first template above, the entire

class will have just heard Aaron’s point about the two sides

being closer than they seem. Why then would you need to

restate it?

We agree that in oral situations, it does often sound artificial

to restate what others just said precisely because they just said

it. It would be awkward if, on being asked to pass the salt at

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Entering Class Discussions

165

lunch, one were to reply: “If I understand you correctly, you

have asked me to pass the salt. Yes, I can, and here it is.” But

in oral discussions about complicated issues that are open to

multiple interpretations, we usually do need to resummarize

what others have said to make sure that everyone is on the

same page. Since Aaron may have made several points when

he spoke and may have been followed by other commentators,

the class will probably need you to summarize which point of his

you are referring to. And even if Aaron made only one point,

restating that point is helpful, not only to remind the group

what his point was (since some may have missed or forgotten it)

but also to make sure that he, you, and others have interpreted

his point in the same way.

to change the subject,

indicate explicitly that you are doing so

It is fine to try to change the conversation’s direction. There’s

just one catch: you need to make clear to listeners that this is

what you are doing. For example:

j So far we have been talking about the characters in the film. But

isn’t the real issue here the cinematography?

j I’d like to change the subject to one that hasn’t yet been

addressed.

You can try to change the subject without indicating that you

are doing so. But you risk that your comment will come across as

irrelevant rather than as a thoughtful contribution that moves

the conversation forward.

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twelve twelve “I TAKE YOUR POINT”

166

be even more explicit

than you would be in writing

Because listeners in an oral discussion can’t go back and reread

what you just said, they are more easily overloaded than are

readers of a print text. For this reason, in a class discussion you

will do well to take some extra steps to help listeners follow

your train of thought. (1) When you make a comment, limit

yourself to one point only though you can elaborate on this

point, fleshing it out with examples and evidence. If you feel

you must make two points, either unite them under one larger

umbrella point, or make one point first and save the other for

later. Trying to bundle two or more claims into one comment

can result in neither getting the attention it deserves. (2) Use

metacommentary to highlight your key point so that listeners

can readily grasp it.

j In other words, what I’m trying to get at here is .

j My point is this: .

j My point, though, is not , but .

j This distinction is important because .

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167

THIRTEEN

“imho”

Is Digital Communication

Good or Bad—or Both?

You may wonder what our advice in this book about enter-

ing conversations and debates has to do with one of the major

innovations in our society, the online technologies through

which we now do much of our reading and writing. You may

have heard parents and journalists complain that smartphones,

iPads, and other electronic devices that seem almost wired into

our brains are destroying our ability to think, communicate,

and interact with others. At the same time, you’ve also prob-

ably heard counterarguments to the effect that, on the con-

trary, these digital technologies actually stretch the mind, bring

people together, and even make us better writers.

These arguments are part of a set of interrelated debates

that are taking place today, sometimes in the blogosphere itself,

among journalists, academic researchers, and other commenta-

tors. In some of these debates, those who extol their virtues

argue that today’s new online technologies make us smarter by

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168

thirteen thirteen “IMHO”

exposing us to a wide range of perspectives and giving us instant

access to massive stores of new information. Whereas once we

would have had to spend hours burrowing through dusty library

shelves to find the information we need, today we can access

the same information with a click of a mouse in the comfort

of our homes. Thanks to the internet, our potential knowledge

is now thousands of times greater than ever before. How could

such a development not be a huge plus for any writer?

The critics, however, retort that, far from making us smarter,

online technologies are actually making us dumber, even in

our capacity as writers. According to these critics, many online

researchers end their investigations at the first entry that comes

up in a Google search (often in Wikipedia), and the constraints

of email, text messaging, and tweeting force us to communicate

in reductive sound-bites and inane abbreviations (OMG! LOL!

IMHO!). The critics also charge that the very volume of new

information that the web makes so easily available overwhelms

us and prevents us from thinking clearly. So much comes at

us so fast from electronic sources that we can no longer think

straight or organize our thoughts into clear writing. The greater

the mountain of information we have at our fingertips, say the

critics, the less chance there is that we will find the fraction of

it that is most valuable and useful to focus on and respond to.

As a result, according to one critic, researcher Clifford Nass,

the multitasking encouraged by the web and other digital tech-

nologies is making student writers less able to sustain a “big

idea” in an essay and more prone to write in “little bursts and

snippets” (Nass).

Yet many challenge this pessimistic view. Rhetoric and

composition professor Andrea Lunsford rejects the notion

that “Google is making us stupid,” that “Facebook is frying our

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Is Digital Communication Good or Bad—or Both?

169

brains,” and that the web is depriving students of the ability to

express ideas (qtd. in Haven). According to Lunsford, reporting

on a five-year research project, the Stanford Study of Writing,

student writers today are remarkably “adept at crafting messages

that will reach their intended audience because of their con-

stant use of social media” (Lunsford). That is, today’s students

are proficient “at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their

audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get

their point across” (Thompson).

There is also disagreement over whether online technolo-

gies create or undermine genuine conversation and commu-

nity. On the one hand, some praise the web for its ability to

bring people from distant places together who otherwise would

remain strangers, enabling them to interact more easily with

others through such mediums as email, blogs, videochat, and

social networking sites. Those who make this argument might

claim that our advice in this book to present your ideas as a

response to the ideas of others lends itself well to online com-

munication. After all, the internet allows us to post something

and then get quick, even instantaneous responses. It also allows

us more easily to access multiple perspectives on any topic and

then directly insert the voices of others into our text in links

that readers can click on.

Critics on the other hand question the quality of the conver-

sations that take place online, arguing that these conversations

are rarely genuine meetings of minds and noting that online

writers often speak past rather than to or with one another.

Because online writers can hit “send” before reflecting, as writ-

ers more likely would using slower and more deliberate print

media, these critics charge that true debate in which the vari-

ous parties really listen to one another is exceedingly rare on

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170

thirteen thirteen “IMHO”

the web. In other words, communicating online tends to under-

mine true conversation because writers can too easily dismiss

or ignore other points of view, and thus are more likely to

engage in egotistical monologues in which they use what others

say as a pretext for expounding their own already established

opinions.

So go some of the arguments pro and con about the impact

of online technologies on our thinking and our communicative

habits, including our writing. Though we agree that the internet

has given us access to previously unimaginable stores of infor-

mation and greatly expanded our range of communication—

and that it potentially broadens our perspectives—we think

the critics have a point in noting that many conversations on

the web are not exchanges so much as monologues in which

writers pass one another without intersecting. We ourselves

have been dismayed when our own online articles have drawn

comments that begin, “I haven’t read Graff and Birkenstein’s

article, but in my opinion. . . .” In our view, the best remedy

for such failures of communication is to improve the listening

and summarizing skills we emphasize in this book, whether

these skills are practiced online, offline, or even on a stone

tablet.

As for how these digital technologies have influenced stu-

dent writing, our own view, based on the writing we have seen

in our combined seventy years of teaching, is that that this

influence is neither disastrous, as the critics fear, nor won-

derfully revolutionary, as the proponents claim. Contrary to

Nass, student writers found it challenging to sustain a “big idea”

long before the advent of the worldwide web, and, contrary to

Lunsford, we see no evidence that tweeting and posting have

made writers more adept at reaching audiences. As we see it,

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Is Digital Communication Good or Bad—or Both?

171

online technologies only recycle any difficulties writers have

reaching audiences; if a writer has trouble reaching audiences

in one medium, he or she will have it in another. A student

of ours, for example, writing to an audience of his classmates

on a course listserv, began a post in the following way:

“Going off what Meg said, I would argue…”

His audience was mystified, since nobody, including Meg

herself, could remember what she had said. As this incident

illustrates, the immediacy of online writing—not just in course

listservs, but in emails, social media, and so forth—makes it

appear so much like oral communication that we are seduced

into forgetting that it is still a form of writing and therefore very

often requires the mastery of formal conventions, in this case

that of summarizing what has previously been said. It is hard

to imagine any writer, as we have already suggested, who does

not struggle with the rhetorical moves of argument, from sum-

marizing, explaining, and quoting what others say to responding

to what they say, and the myriad other competencies covered

in this book.

Our purpose in this brief chapter, however, is not to try

to settle these debates, but to invite you to think about how

digital technologies affect your work as a reader and writer.

Do these technologies make it easier to join conversations?

Do they improve or degrade your thinking and writing? What

is your opinion and why? To help you answer these questions,

we conclude, then, with a couple of exercises that invite you

to pick up where we have left off—and, as Kenneth Burke said,

to put in your own oar.

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172

thirteen thirteen “IMHO”

Works Cited

Haven, Cynthia. “The New Literacy: Stanford Study Finds Richness and

Complexity in Students’ Writing.” Stanford Report. Stanford University,

12 Oct. 2009. Web. 14 Nov. 2013.

Lunsford, Andrea. “Everyone’s an Author.” Presentation to Norton travelers,

Park City. 6 Aug. 2012. Lecture.

Nass, Clifford. Interview. Frontline. PBS. WGBH, Boston, 1 Dec. 2009. Web.

14 Nov. 2013.

Thompson, Clive. “Clive Thompson on the New Literacy.” Wired. Condé

Nast, 24 Aug. 2009. Web. 14 Nov. 2013.

Exercises

1. Have we formulated the debatable issues above in a useful

way? Have we left out anything important? Write an essay

in which you summarize some of our commentary as your

“they say” and offer your own response, whether to disagree,

agree with a difference, or reframe the issues in some way.

2. As a test case for thinking about the questions raised in

this chapter, go to the blog that accompanies this book,

theysayiblog.com. Examine some of the exchanges that

appear there and evaluate the quality of the responses. For

example, how well do the participants in these exchanges

summarize one another’s claims before making their own

responses? How would you characterize any discussion? Is

there a true meeting of the minds or are writers sometimes

caricatured or treated as straw men? How do these online dis-

cussions compare with the face to face discussions you have

in class? What advantages does each offer? Go to other blogs

on topics that interest you and ask these same questions.

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173

FOURTEEN

“what’s motivating this writer?”

Reading for the Conversation

“What is the author’s argument? What is he or she

trying to say?” For many years, these were the first questions we

would ask our classes in a discussion of an assigned reading. The

discussion that resulted was often halting, as our students strug-

gled to get a handle on the argument, but eventually, after some

awkward silences, the class would come up with something we

could all agree was an accurate summary of the author’s main

thesis. Even after we’d gotten over that hurdle, however, the

discussion would often still seem forced, and would limp along

as we all struggled with the question that naturally arose next:

Now that we had determined what the author was saying, what

did we ourselves have to say?

For a long time we didn’t worry much about these halting

discussions, justifying them to ourselves as the predictable result

of assigning difficult, challenging readings. Several years ago,

however, as we started writing this book and began thinking

about writing as the art of entering conversations, we latched

onto the idea of leading with some different questions: “What

other argument(s) is the writer responding to?” “Is the writer

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fourteen fourteen “WHAT’S MOTIVATING THIS WRITER?”

174

disagreeing or agreeing with something, and if so what?” “What

is motivating the writer’s argument?” “Are there other ideas

that you have encountered in this class or elsewhere that might

be pertinent?” The results were often striking. The discussions

that followed tended to be far livelier and to draw in a greater

number of students. We were still asking students to look for

the main argument, but we were now asking them to see that

argument as a response to some other argument that provoked

it, gave it a reason for being, and helped all of us see why we

should care about it.

What had happened, we realized, was that by changing

the opening question, we changed the way our students

approached reading, and perhaps the way they thought about

academic work in general. Instead of thinking of the argu-

ment of a text as an isolated entity, they now thought of that

argument as one that responded to and provoked other argu-

ments. Since they were now dealing not with one argument

but at least two (the author’s argument and the one[s] he or

she was responding to), they now had alternative ways of see-

ing the topic at hand. This meant that, instead of just trying

to understand the view presented by the author, they were

more able to question that view intelligently and engage in

the type of discussion and debate that is the hallmark of a

college education. In our discussions, animated debates often

arose between students who found the author’s argument con-

vincing and others who were more convinced by the view it

was challenging. In the best of these debates, the binary posi-

tions would be questioned by other students, who suggested

each was too simple, that both might be right or that a third

alternative was possible. Still other students might object that

the discussion thus far had missed the author’s real point and

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Reading for the Conversation

175

suggest that we all go back to the text and pay closer attention

to what it actually said.

We eventually realized that the move from reading for the

author’s argument in isolation to reading for how the author’s

argument is in conversation with the arguments of others helps

readers become active, critical readers rather than passive recip-

ients of knowledge. On some level, reading for the conversa-

tion is more rigorous and demanding than reading for what

one author says. It asks that you determine not only what the

author thinks, but how what the author thinks fits with what

others think, and ultimately with what you yourself think. Yet

on another level, reading this way is a lot simpler and more

familiar than reading for the thesis alone, since it returns writ-

ing to the familiar, everyday act of communicating with other

people about real issues.

deciphering the conversation

We suggest, then, that when assigned a reading, you imagine

the author not as sitting alone in an empty room hunched

over a desk or staring at a screen, but as sitting in a crowded

coffee shop talking to others who are making claims that he

or she is engaging with. In other words, imagine the author as

participating in an ongoing, multisided, conversation in which

everyone is trying to persuade others to agree or at least to take

his or her position seriously.

The trick in reading for the conversation is to figure out

what views the author is responding to and what the author’s own

argument is—or, to put it in the terms used in this book, to

determine the “they say” and how the author responds to it.

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fourteen fourteen “WHAT’S MOTIVATING THIS WRITER?”

176

One of the challenges in reading for the “they say” and “I say”

can be figuring out which is which, since it may not be obvious

when writers are summarizing others and when they are speak-

ing for themselves. Readers need to be alert for any changes in

voice that a writer might make, since instead of using explicit

road-mapping phrases like “although many believe,” authors

may simply summarize the view that they want to engage with

and indicate only subtly that it is not their own.

Consider again the opening to the selection by David

Zinczenko on p. 241.

If ever there were a newspaper headline custom made for Jay Leno’s

monologue, this was it. Kids taking on McDonald’s this week, suing

the company for making them fat. Isn’t that like middle-aged men

suing Porsche for making them get speeding tickets? Whatever

happened to personal responsibility?

I tend to sympathize with these portly fast-food patrons, though.

Maybe that’s because I used to be one of them.

David Zinczenko, “Don’t Blame the Eater”

Whenever we teach this passage, some students inevitably

assume that Zinczenko must be espousing the view expressed

in his first paragraph: that suing McDonald’s is ridicu-

lous. When their reading is challenged by their class-

mates, these students point to the page and reply,

“Look. It’s right here on the page. This is what Zinczenko

wrote. These are his exact words.” The assumption these stu-

dents are making is that if something appears on the page,

the author must endorse it. In fact, however, we ventrilo-

quize views that we don’t believe in, and may in fact pas-

sionately disagree with, all the time. The central clues that

Zinczenko disagrees with the view expressed in his opening

See Chapter 6

for more

discussion of

naysayers.

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Reading for the Conversation

177

paragraph come in the second paragraph, when he finally

offers a first-person declaration and uses a constrastive transi-

tion, “though,” thereby resolving any questions about where

he stands.

when the “they say” is unstated

Another challenge can be identifying the “they say” when it is

not explicitly identified. Whereas Zinczenko offers an up-front

summary of the view he is responding to, other writers assume

that their readers are so familiar with these views that they need

not name or summarize them. In such cases, you the reader

have to reconstruct the unstated “they say” that is motivating

the text through a process of inference.

See, for instance, if you can reconstruct the position that

Tamara Draut is challenging in the opening paragraph of her

essay “The Growing College Gap.”

“The first in her family to graduate from college.” How many times

have we heard that phrase, or one like it, used to describe a success-

ful American with a modest background? In today’s United States, a

four-year degree has become the all-but-official ticket to middle-class

security. But if your parents don’t have much money or higher edu-

cation in their own right, the road to college—and beyond—looks

increasingly treacherous. Despite a sharp increase in the proportion of

high school graduates going on to some form of postsecondary educa-

tion, socio-economic status continues to exert a powerful influence on

college admission and completion; in fact, gaps in enrollment by class

and race, after declining in the 1960s and 1970s, are once again as

wide as they were thirty years ago, and getting wider, even as college

has become far more crucial to lifetime fortunes.

Tamara Draut, “The Growing College Gap”

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fourteen fourteen “WHAT’S MOTIVATING THIS WRITER?”

178

You might think that the “they say” here is embedded in the

third sentence: They say (or we all think) that a four-year

degree is “the all-but-official ticket to middle-class security,”

and you might assume that Draut will go on to disagree.

If you read the passage this way, however, you would be

mistaken. Draut is not questioning whether a college degree has

become “the ticket to middle-class security,” but whether most

Americans can obtain that ticket, whether college is within the

financial reach of most American families. You may have been

thrown off by the “but” following the statement that college

has become a prerequisite for middle-class security. However,

unlike the “though” in Zinczenko’s opening, this “but” does

not signal that Draut will be disagreeing with the view she has

just summarized, a view that in fact she takes as a given. What

Draut disagrees with is that this ticket to middle-class security

is still readily available to the middle and working classes.

Were one to imagine Draut in a room talking with others

with strong views on this topic, one would need to picture her

challenging not those who think college is a ticket to financial

security (something she agrees with and takes for granted), but

those who think the doors of college are open to anyone willing

to put forth the effort to walk through them. The view that

Draut is challenging, then, is not summarized in her opening.

Instead, she assumes that readers are already so familiar with

this view that it need not be stated.

Draut’s example suggests that in texts where the central “they

say” is not immediately identified, you have to construct it your-

self based on the clues the text provides. You have to start by

locating the writer’s thesis and then imagine some of the argu-

ments that might be made against it. What would it look like

to disagree with this view? In Draut’s case, it is relatively easy

to construct a counterargument: it is the familiar faith in the

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Reading for the Conversation

179

American Dream of equal opportunity when it comes to access

to college. Figuring out the counterargument not only reveals

what motivated Draut as a writer but helps you respond to her

essay as an active, critical reader. Constructing this counter-

argument can also help you recognize how Draut challenges

your own views, questioning opinions that you previously took

for granted.

when the “they say” is about something

“nobody has talked about”

Another challenge in reading for the conversation is that writ-

ers sometimes build their arguments by responding to a lack

of discussion. These writers build their case not by playing off

views that can be identified (like faith in the American Dream

or the idea that we are responsible for our body weight), but by

pointing to something others have overlooked. As the writing

theorists John M. Swales and Christine B. Feak point out, one

effective way to “create a research space” and “establish a niche”

in the academic world is “by indicating a gap in . . . previous

research.” Much research in the sciences and humanities takes

this “Nobody has noticed X” form.

In such cases, the writer may be responding to scientists,

for example, who have overlooked an obscure plant that offers

insights into global warming, or to literary critics who have been

so busy focusing on the lead character in a play that they have

overlooked something important about the minor characters.

reading particularly challenging texts

Sometimes it is difficult to figure out the views that writers

are responding to not because these writers do not identify

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fourteen fourteen “WHAT’S MOTIVATING THIS WRITER?”

180

those views but because their language and the concepts they

are dealing with are particularly challenging. Consider, for

instance, the first two sentences of Gender Trouble: Feminism

and the Subversion of Identity, a book by the feminist philosopher

and literary theorist Judith Butler, thought by many to be a

particularly difficult academic writer.

Contemporary feminist debates over the meaning of gender lead

time and again to a certain sense of trouble, as if the indeterminacy

of gender might eventually culminate in the failure of feminism.

Perhaps trouble need not carry such a negative valence.

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble:

Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

There are many reasons readers may stumble over this relatively

short passage, not the least of which is that Butler does not

explicitly indicate where her own view begins and the view

she is responding to ends. Unlike Zinczenko, Butler does not

use the first-person “I” or a phrase such as “in my own view” to

show that the position in the second sentence is her own. Nor

does Butler offer a clear transition such as “but” or “however” at

the start of the second sentence to indicate, as Zinczenko does

with “though,” that in the second sentence she is questioning

the argument she has summarized in the first. And finally, like

many academic writers, Butler uses abstract, unfamiliar words

that many readers may need to look up, like “gender” (sexual

identity, male or female), “indeterminacy” (the quality of being

impossible to define or pin down), “culminate” (finally result

in), and “negative valence” (a term borrowed from chemistry,

roughly denoting “negative significance” or “meaning”). For all

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Reading for the Conversation

181

these reasons, we can imagine many readers feeling intimidated

before they reach the third sentence of Butler’s book.

But readers who break down this passage into its essential

parts will find that it is actually a lucid piece of writing that

conforms to the classic “they say / I say” pattern. Though it can

be difficult to spot the clashing arguments in the two sentences,

close analysis reveals that the first sentence offers a way of

looking at a certain type of “trouble” in the realm of feminist

politics that is being challenged in the second.

To understand difficult passages of this kind, you need to

translate them into your own words—to build a bridge, in effect,

between the passage’s unfamiliar terms and ones more familiar

to you. Building such a bridge should help you connect what

you already know to what the author is saying—and will then

help you move from reading to writing, providing you with

some of the language you will need to summarize the text. One

major challenge in translating the author’s words into your own,

however, is to stay true to what the author is actually saying,

avoiding what we call “the closest cliché syndrome,” in which

one mistakes a commonplace idea for an author’s more complex

one (mistaking Butler’s critique of the concept of “woman,” for

instance, for the common idea that women must have equal

rights). The work of complex writers like Butler, who frequently

challenge conventional thinking, cannot always be

collapsed into the types of ideas most of us are already

familiar with. Therefore, when you translate, do not

try to fit the ideas of such writers into your preexisting beliefs,

but instead allow your own views to be challenged. In building

a bridge to the writers you read, it is often necessary to meet

those writers more than halfway.

So what, then, does Butler’s opening say? Translating But-

ler’s words into terms that are easier to understand, we can

For more on the

closest cliché

syndrome,

see Chapter 2.

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fourteen fourteen “WHAT’S MOTIVATING THIS WRITER?”

182

see that the first sentence says that for many feminists today,

“the indeterminacy of gender”—the inability to define the

essence of sexual identity—spells the end of feminism; that

for many feminists the inability to define “gender,” presumably

the building block of the feminist movement, means serious

“trouble” for feminist politics. In contrast, the second sen-

tence suggests that this same “trouble” need not be thought of

in such “negative” terms, that the inability to define feminin-

ity, or “gender trouble” as Butler calls it in her book’s title,

may not be such a bad thing—and, as she goes on to argue

in the pages that follow, may even be something that femi-

nist activists can profit from. In other words, Butler suggests,

highlighting uncertainties about masculinity and femininity

can be a powerful feminist tool.

Pulling all these inferences together, then, the opening sen-

tences can be translated as follows: “While many contempo-

rary feminists believe that uncertainty about what it means to

be a woman will undermine feminist politics, I, Judith Butler,

believe that this uncertainty can actually help strengthen femi-

nist politics.” Translating Butler’s point into our own book’s

basic move: “They say that if we cannot define ‘woman,’ femi-

nism is in big trouble. But I say that this type of trouble is

precisely what feminism needs.” Despite its difficulty, then,

we hope you agree that this initially intimidating passage does

make sense if you stay with it.

We hope it is clear that critical reading is a two-way street.

It is just as much about being open to the way that writers

can challenge you, maybe even transform you, as it is about

questioning those writers. And if you translate a writer’s argu-

ment into your own words as you read, you should allow the

text to take you outside the ideas that you already hold and

to introduce you to new terms and concepts. Even if you end

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Reading for the Conversation

183

up disagreeing with an author, you first have to show that you

have really listened to what he or she is saying, have fully

grasped his or her arguments, and can accurately summarize

those arguments. Without such deep, attentive listening, any

critique you make will be superficial and decidedly uncritical.

It will be a critique that says more about you than about the

writer or idea you’re supposedly responding to.

In this chapter we have tried to show that reading for the

conversation means looking not just for the thesis of a text in

isolation but for the view or views that motivate that thesis—

the “they say.” We have also tried to show that reading for

the conversation means being alert for the different strategies

writers use to engage the view(s) that are motivating them,

since not all writers engage other perspectives in the same way.

Some writers explicitly identify and summarize a view they are

responding to at the outset of their text and then return to it

frequently as their text unfolds. Some refer only obliquely to

a view that is motivating them, assuming that readers will be

able to reconstruct that view on their own. Other writers may

not explicitly distinguish their own view from the views they

are questioning in ways that all of us find clear, leaving some

readers to wonder whether a given view is the writer’s own or

one that he or she is challenging. And some writers push off

against the “they say” that is motivating them in a challeng-

ing academic language that requires readers to translate what

they are saying into more accessible, everyday terms. In sum,

then, though most persuasive writers do follow a conversational

“they say / I say” pattern, they do so in a great variety of ways.

What this means for readers is that they need to be armed with

various strategies for detecting the conversations in what they

read, even when those conversations are not self-evident.

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184

FIFTEEN

“on closer examination”

Entering Conversations about Literature

In chinua achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo,

the main character, is a tragic hero.

So what? Who cares?

Why does this typical way of opening an essay on a literary

work leave readers wondering, “Why are you telling me this?”

Because, in our view, such statements leave it unclear who would

say otherwise. Would anyone deny that the main character of

Achebe’s novel is a tragic hero? Is there some other view of the

subject that this writer is responding to? Since no such alternative

interpretation is indicated, the reader thinks, “OK, Okonkwo is

a tragic hero—as opposed to what?”

Now compare this opening with another possible one:

Several members of our class have argued that Okonkwo, the main

character of Things Fall Apart, is a hateful villain. My own view,

however, is that, while it is true that Okonkwo commits villain-

ous acts, he is ultimately a tragic hero—a flawed but ultimately

sympathetic figure.

We hope you agree that the second version, which responds

to what someone else says about Okonkwo, makes for more

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Entering Conversations about Literature

185

engaging writing than the first. Since the first version fails to

present itself as a response to any alternative view of its subject,

it comes at readers out of the blue, leaving them wondering

why it needs to be said at all.

As we stress in this book, it is the views of others and

our desire to respond to these views that gives our writing

its underlying motivation and helps readers see why what we

say matters, why others should care, and why we need to say

it in the first place. In this chapter we suggest that this same

principle applies to writing about literature. Literary critics,

after all, don’t make assertions about literary works out of the

blue. Rather, they contribute to discussions and debates about

the meaning and significance of literary works, some of which

may continue for years and even centuries.

Indeed, this commitment to discussion animates most

literature courses, in which students discuss and debate assigned

works in class before writing papers about them. The premise is

that engaging with classmates and teachers enables us to make

discoveries about the work that we might not arrive at in simply

reading the work alone.

We suggest that you think of writing about literature as a

natural extension of such in-class discussions, listening carefully

to others and using what they say to set up and motivate what

you have to say.

start with what others are saying

But in writing about literature, where do views to respond to—

“they says”—come from? Many sources. Published literary criti-

cism is perhaps the most obvious:

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fifteen fifteen “ON CLOSER EXAMINATION”

j Critic X complains that Author Y’s story is compromised by

his perspective. While there’s some truth to this cri-

tique, I argue that Critic X overlooks .

j According to Critic A, novel X suggests . I agree, but

would add that .

But the view that you respond to in writing about literature

can be far closer to home than published literary criticism. As

our opening example illustrates, it can be something said about

the literary work by a classmate or teacher:

j Several members of our class have suggested that the final

message of play X is . I agree up to a point, but I

still think that .

Another tactic is to start with something you yourself thought

about the work that on second thought you now want to

revise:

j On first reading play Z, I thought it was an uncritical celebra-

tion of . After rereading the play and discussing it in

class, however, I see that it is more critical of than I

originally thought.

You can even respond to something that hasn’t actually been

said about the work, but might hypothetically be said:

j It might be said that poem Y is chiefly about . But the

problem with this reading, in my view, is .

j Though religious readers might be tempted to analyze poem X

as a parable about , a closer examination suggests

that the poem is in fact .

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Entering Conversations about Literature

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Sometimes, the “they say” that you respond to in writing

about a literary work can be found in the work itself, as distinct

from what some critic or other reader has said about the work.

Much great literary criticism responds directly to the literary

work, summarizing some aspect of the work’s form or content

and then assessing it, in much the same way you can do in

response to a persuasive essay:

j Ultimately, as I read it, The Scarlet Letter seems to say

. I have trouble accepting this proposition, however,

on the grounds that .

One of the more powerful ways of responding to a literary work

is to address any contradictions or inconsistencies:

j At the beginning of the poem, we encounter the generalization,

seemingly introducing the poem’s message, that “ .”

But this statement is then contradicted by the suggestion made

later in the poem that “ .” This opens up a significant

inconsistency in the text: is it suggesting or, on the

contrary, ?

j At several places in novel X, Author Y leads us to understand that

the story’s central point is that . Yet elsewhere the

text suggests , indicating that Y may be ambivalent

on this issue.

If you review the above templates, you’ll notice that each

does what a good discussion, lecture, or essay does: it makes

an argument about some aspect of a work that can be inter-

preted in various ways. Instead of just making a claim about

the work in isolation—character X is a tragic hero; sonnet Y is

about the loss of a loved one—these templates put one claim

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188

fifteen fifteen “ON CLOSER EXAMINATION”

as a response to another, making clear what motivated the

argument to begin with. They thus act as conversation starters

that can invite or even provoke other readers to respond with

their own interpretations and judgments.

figuring out

what a literary work “means”

In order to enter conversations and debates about literature, you

need to meet the time-honored challenge of being able to read

and make sense of literary works, understanding and analyzing

what the text says. On the one hand, like the types of persuasive

essays we focus on throughout this book, literary works make

arguments their authors want to convey, things they are for

and against, ideas they want to endorse or condemn. On the

other hand, discovering “the argument” of a literary work—

what it’s “saying”—can be a special challenge because, unlike

persuasive essays, literary works usually do not spell out their

arguments explicitly. Though poets, novelists, and playwrights

may have the same level of conviction as persuasive writers,

rarely do they step out from behind the pages of their texts and

say, “Okay, folks, this is what it all means. What I’m trying to

say in a nutshell is .” That is, since literary texts do

not include an explicit thesis statement identifying their main

point, it’s left up to us as readers to figure it out.

Because literary works tend to avoid such explicitness, their

meanings often need to be teased out from the clues they pro-

vide: from the dialogue between characters, the plot, the imag-

ery and symbolism, and the kind of language the author uses. In

fact, it is this absence of overt argument that makes literature

so endlessly debatable—and explains why scholars and critics

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Entering Conversations about Literature

189

argue so much about what literary works mean in ways similar

to the classroom discussions that you have likely participated

in as a student.

The Elusive Literary Author

Indeed, not even the use of the first person “I” in a literary work

is an indication that you have located the author’s own position

or stance, as it usually is in an essay. When David Zinczenko,

for example, in his essay “Don’t Blame the Eater” (pp. 241–43)

writes “I tend to sympathize with these portly fast-food patrons”

who file lawsuits against the fast food industry, we can be confi-

dent that the “I” is Zinczenko himself, and that the position he

expresses is his own and informs everything else in his essay. But

we cannot assume that the “I” who addresses us in a work of fic-

tion or poetry is necessarily the author, for he or she is a fictional

character—and one who may be unreliable and untrustworthy.

Take, for example, the first sentence of Edgar Allan Poe’s

short story “The Cask of Amontillado”:

The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could, but

when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge.

As soon becomes clear in the story, the “I” who speaks as the nar-

rator here is not Poe himself but an insanely vengeful murderer

whose words must be seen through to get at the point of Poe’s story.

Instead of a readily identifiable position, literary works often

present the perspectives of a number of different characters

and leave it to readers to determine which if any speaks for

the author. Thus when we encounter the seemingly eloquent

lines in Hamlet, “To thine own self be true / And thou shalt

not be false to any man,” we can’t assume, as we might if we

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190

fifteen fifteen “ON CLOSER EXAMINATION”

encountered this statement in an essay, that it represents the

author’s own view. For these words are uttered by Polonius,

a character whom Shakespeare presents as a tedious, cliché-

spouting bore—not someone he leads us to trust. After all, part

of Hamlet’s problem is that it’s not clear to him what being

“true” to his own self would require him to do.

This elusive quality of literary texts helps explain why some

of our students complain about the challenge of finding the

“hidden meaning,” as they sometimes call it, let alone sum-

marizing that meaning in the way assignments often require.

Sure, some students say, they enjoy reading literature for plea-

sure. But analyzing literature in school for its “meaning” or

“symbolism”—that’s another matter. Some even say that the

requirement that they hunt for meanings and symbols robs lit-

erature of its fun.

In fact, as most students come to recognize, analyzing mean-

ings, symbols, and other elements should enhance rather than

stifle the pleasure we get from reading literature. But it can

indeed be hard to figure out what literary works mean. How

do we determine the point of a story or poem when the author,

unlike an essayist like Zinczenko, does not tell us explicitly what

he or she is trying to say? How do you go from a fictional event

or poetic image (an insane man committing murder, two roads

that diverge in the woods) or from a dialogue between fictional

characters (“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”) to what

these events, images, or lines of dialogue mean?

Look for Conflict in the Work

There is no simple recipe for figuring out what a literary work

means, but one tactic that seems to help our own students is

to look for the conflict or debate in the literary work itself and

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Entering Conversations about Literature

191

then ask what the text is leading us to think about that conflict.

Asking these questions—what is the conflict in the work and

which side, if any, should we favor?—will help you think about

and formulate a position on what the work means. And since

such claims are often ones that literary scholars argue about,

thinking about the conflict in a literary work will often lead

you to discussions and debates about the work that you can

then respond to in your writing. Because literary authors don’t

tell us explicitly what the text means, it’s always going to be

arguable—and your task in writing about a literary work is to

argue for what you think it means. Here are two templates to

help get you started responding to other interpretations:

j It might be argued that in the clash between character X

and Y in play Z, the author wants us to favor character Y, since

she is presented as the play’s heroine. I contend, however,

that .

j Several critics seem to assume that poem X endorses the

values of discipline and rationality represented by the image

of over those of play and emotion represented by

the image of . I agree, but with the following caveat:

that the poem ultimately sees both values as equally important

and even suggests that ideally they should complement one

another.

This tactic of looking for the conflicts in literary works is part of

a long tradition of critical thought that sees conflict as central

to literature. In ancient Greece, Aristotle argued that conflict

between characters or forces underlies the plots of tragic dramas

such as Oedipus. Indeed, the ancient Greek word agon, which

means antagonism, conflict, or debate, leaves its traces in the

term “protagonist,” the hero or leading character of a narrative

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192

fifteen fifteen “ON CLOSER EXAMINATION”

work who comes into conflict with other characters or with the

fates. And Plato noted the pervasiveness of conflict in litera-

ture when he banished poets from his ideal community on the

grounds that their works depict endless conflict and division.

This emphasis on the centrality of conflict in literature has

been echoed by modern theorists like the New Critics of the

1940s and 50s, who focused on such tensions and paradoxes as

good and evil or innocence and experience—and more recently

by poststructuralists and political theorists who see literature,

like society, as saturated by such polarities as male/female,

gay/straight, white/black, and so on. Writers today continue

to recognize conflict as the engine of good storytelling. As the

Hollywood screenwriter Robert McKee puts it, “Nothing moves

forward in a story except through conflict.”

Building on this idea that conflict is central to literature,

we suggest the following four questions to help you understand

and formulate your own position on any literary work:

1. What is the central conflict?

2. Which side—if any—does the text seem to favor?

3. What’s your evidence? How might others interpret the evi-

dence differently?

4. What’s your opinion of the text?

what is the central conflict?

Conflicts tend to manifest themselves in different ways in dif-

ferent literary genres. In works that take a narrative or story

form (novels, short stories, and plays), the central conflict will

often be represented in an actual debate between characters.

These debates between characters will often reflect larger ques-

tions and debates in the society or historical era in which they

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Entering Conversations about Literature

193

were written, over such issues as the responsibility of rulers, the

consequences of capitalism and consumerism, or the struggle for

gender equality. Sometimes these debates will be located within

an individual character, appearing as a struggle in someone

caught between conflicting or incompatible choices. Whatever

form they may take, these debates can provide you with points

of entry into the issues raised by the work, its historical context,

and its author’s vision of the world.

One narrative work that lends itself to such an approach is

Flannery O’Connor’s 1961 short story “Everything That Rises

Must Converge,” which is reprinted on pp. 272–91. The story

presents a running debate between a mother and her son Julian

about the civil rights movement for racial equality that had

erupted in the American South at the time the story was writ-

ten, with Julian defending the outlook of this movement and

his mother defending the South’s traditional racial hierarchy.

The story raises the debatable question of which character we

should side with: Julian, his mother, both, or neither?

which side—if any—does the

text seem to favor?

When we teach this story, most of our students first assume the

story sides with Julian’s outlook, which to them as Northern,

urban college students in the twenty-first century seems the

obviously enlightened position. Who, after all, could fail to see

that the mother’s views are backward and racist? As our class

discussions unfold, however, most students come to reject this

view as a misreading, one based more on their own views than

on what’s in the text. Sooner or later, someone points out that

at several points Julian is presented in highly critical ways—and

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fifteen fifteen “ON CLOSER EXAMINATION”

that his apparently progressive sympathy for racial integration

rests on arid intellectual abstractions and a hypocritical lack of

self-knowledge, in contrast with his mother’s heartfelt loyalty to

her roots. Eventually another possible interpretation surfaces,

that both characters suffer from a common malady, that they’re

living in a mental bubble that keeps them from being able to

see themselves as they really are.

The writing assignment we often give builds on this class

discussion by offering students the following template for think-

ing about which character, if any, the text leads them to favor:

j Some might argue that when it comes to the conflict between

Julian and his mother over , our sympathies should

lie with . My own view is that .

what’s your evidence?

In entering the types of discussions and debates modeled by the

above template, how do you determine where your “sympathies

should lie”? More generally, how do you arrive at and justify

an interpretation of what a literary text says?

The answer lies in the evidence provided by the work: its

images, dialogue, plot, historical references, tone, stylistic

details, and so forth.

It is important to remember, however, that evidence is not

set in stone. Students sometimes assume that there exists some

fixed code that unlocks the meaning of literary works, sym-

bols, images, and other evidence. A character dies? This must

mean that he or she is being condemned. A stairway appears?

A symbol for upward mobility. A garden? Must be something

sexual.

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Entering Conversations about Literature

195

But evidence itself is open to interpretation and thus to

debate. The mother’s death in O’Connor’s story, for instance,

could be seen as evidence that we are supposed to disapprove

of her as someone whose racial views are regressive and on

the way out. On the other hand, her death may instead be

evidence that she is to be seen as a heroic martyr too good for

this cruel, harsh world. What a character’s death means, then,

depends—on how he or she is treated in the work, positively

or negatively, which in turn may be subject to debate.

As we’ve repeatedly emphasized in this book, others will

often disagree with you and may even use the same evidence

you do to support interpretations that are contrary to your own.

Like other objects of study, literary works are like the famous

ambiguous drawing that can be seen as either a duck or a rabbit,

depending how one views it.

Since the same piece of evidence in a literary work will often

support differing, even opposing interpretations, you need to

argue for what you think the evidence shows—and to acknowl-

edge that others may read that evidence differently.

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fifteen fifteen “ON CLOSER EXAMINATION”

In writing about literature, then, you need to show that the

evidence you are citing supports your interpretation and to

anticipate other alternative ones:

j Although some might read the metaphor of in this

poem as evidence that, for Author X, modern technology under-

mines community traditions and values, I see it as .

To present evidence in such a “they say / I say” way, you need

to be alert for how others may read the work differently than

you—and even use this very same evidence in support of an

opposing interpretation:

j Some might claim that evidence X suggests , but I

argue that, on the contrary, it suggests .

j I agree with my classmate that the image of

in novel Y is evidence of childhood innocence that

has been lost. Unlike , however, I think this loss of

innocence is to be read not as a tragic event but as a necessary,

even helpful, stage in human development.

Are Some Interpretations Simply Wrong?

No matter how flexible and open to debate evidence might

be, not all interpretations we arrive at using that evidence are

equally valid. And some interpretations are simply unsupported

by that evidence. Let us illustrate.

As we noted earlier, some of our students first favored Julian

over his mother. One student, let us call her Nancy, cited as

evidence a passage early in the story in which Julian is com-

pared to Saint Sebastian, a Christian martyr who is said to

have exhibited exceptional faith under extreme suffering and

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Entering Conversations about Literature

197

persecution. As the mother stood preparing for Julian to take

her to her weekly swimming class, Julian is described as standing

“pinned to the door frame, waiting like Saint Sebastian for the

arrows to begin piercing him.”

Thinking this passage proves that Julian is the more sym-

pathetic character, Nancy pointed to other evidence as well,

including the following passage:

[Julian] was free of prejudice and unafraid to face facts. Most mirac-

ulous of all, instead of being blinded by love for [his mother] as

she was for him, he had cut himself emotionally free of her and

could see her with complete objectivity. He was not dominated

by his mother. (412)

Citing passages like this in her essay, Nancy concluded: “Julian

represents the future of society, a nonracist and an educated

thinker.”

After rereading the story, however, and hearing other stu-

dents’ views, Nancy came to realize that the passages she had

cited—comparing Julian to a saint, suggesting that he is racially

progressive, and that he is “free of” his mother and “objective”

about her—were all intended ironically. Julian congratulates

himself for being saintlike, free of prejudice, and objective, but

the story ultimately implies that he deludes himself.

How did the supporters of the ironic reading convince Nancy

to revise her initial reading—to see it as wrong, unsupported

by the evidence? First, they pointed to the glaring discrepancy

between the situations and kinds of suffering endured by Julian

and Saint Sebastian. Could anyone be serious, they asked, in

comparing something as mundane as being forced to wait a few

minutes to go to the YMCA to a martyr dying for his faith? No,

they answered, and the jarring incongruity of the events being

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198

fifteen fifteen “ON CLOSER EXAMINATION”

compared, they argued, suggests that Julian, far from saintlike,

is presented in this passage as an impatient, ungrateful, unduti-

ful son. In addition, students pointed out that the gap between

Julian’s self-image as a progressive man of “complete objectiv-

ity” and “facts,” “free of [his mother]” and the blubbering young

man crying “Mama, Mama!” with “guilt and sorrow” at the end

of the story suggests that Julian’s righteous, high-minded image

of himself is not to be taken at face value.

At this point you may be wondering, how can we say that

some interpretations of literature must be ruled out as wrong?

Isn’t the great thing about interpreting literary works—in con-

trast to scientific and historical texts—that there are no wrong

answers? Are we saying that there is one “correct” way to read a

literary work—the one way the work itself tells us we “should”

read it?

No, we aren’t saying that there is only one way to read a liter-

ary work. If we believed there were, we would not be offering a

method of literary analysis based on multiple interpretations and

debate. But yes, acknowledging that literary interpretations are

open to debate is not to say that a work can mean anything we

want it to mean, as if all interpretations are equally good. In our

view, and that of most literature teachers, some interpretations

are better than others—more persuasively reasoned and better

grounded in the evidence of the text.

If we maintain that all interpretations are equally valid, we

risk confusing the perspective of the work’s author with our

own, as did the students who confused their own views on the

civil rights movement of the 1960s with Flannery O’Connor’s.

Such misreadings are reminiscent of what we call “the clos-

est cliché syndrome,” where what’s summarized is not the

view the author actually expresses but a familiar cliché—or,

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Entering Conversations about Literature

199

in O’Connor’s case, a certain social belief—that the

writer believes and mistakenly assumes the author must

too. The view that there are no wrong answers in liter-

ary interpretation encourages a kind of solipsism that erases the

difference between us and others and transforms everything we

encounter into a version of ourselves.

As the literary theorist Robert Scholes puts it, reading, con-

ceived “as a submission to the intentions of another is the first

step” to understanding what a literary work is saying. For “if

we do not postulate the existence of [an author] behind the

verbal text,” we will “simply project our own subjective modes

of thought and desire upon the text.” In other words, unless

we do the best we can to get at what the author is saying,

we will never truly recognize his or her ideas except as some

version of our own. Scholes acknowledges that good reading

often involves going beyond the author’s intention, pointing

out contradictions and ideological blind spots, but he argues

that we must recognize the author’s intention before we can try

to see beyond it in these ways.

what’s your opinion of the text?

In accord with the principle that we must try to understand the

text on its own terms before responding to it, we have thus far

in this chapter focused on how to understand and unpack what

literary texts say and do. Our approach to get at what they say

involves looking for the central conflict in the work and then

asking yourself how the author uses various types of evidence

(characters, dialogue, imagery, events, plot, etc.) to guide you

in thinking about that conflict. Ultimately, your job as a reader

See p. 33 for

more on the

closest cliché

syndrome.

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200

fifteen fifteen “ON CLOSER EXAMINATION”

of literature is to be open to a work as its author presents it, or

else your reading will fail to see what makes that work worth

reading and thinking about.

But once you have reached a good understanding of the

work, it is time to allow your own opinion to come into play.

Offering your own interpretation of a work and opening that

interpretation to response are crucial steps in any act of literary

analysis, but they are not the end of the process. The final step

involves offering your own insight into or critique of the work

and its vision, assessing whether, as you see it, it is morally

justified or questionable, unified or contradictory, historically

regressive or progressive, and so forth. For example:

Though she is one of the most respected Southern authors of the

American literary canon, Flannery O’Connor continually deni-

grates the one character in her 1961 story who represents the civil

rights movement, and in so doing disparages progressive ideas that

I believe deserve a far more sympathetic hearing.

Offering a critique, however, doesn’t necessarily mean finding

fault:

Some criticize O’Connor’s story by suggesting that it has a politi-

cally regressive agenda. But I see the story as a laudable critique

of politics as such. In my view, O’Connor’s story rightly criticizes

the polarization of political conflicts—North vs. South, liberal vs.

conservative, and the like—and suggests that they need to come

together: to “converge,” as O’Connor’s title implies, through reli-

gious love, understanding, and forgiveness.

We realize that the prospect of critiquing a literary work can

be daunting. Indeed, simply stating what you think an author is

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Entering Conversations about Literature

201

saying can be intimidating, since it means going out on a limb,

asserting something about highly respected figures—works that

are often complex, contradictory, and connected to larger his-

torical movements. Nevertheless, if you can master these chal-

lenges, you may find that figuring out what a literary work is

saying, offering an opinion about it, and entering into conversa-

tion and debate with others about such questions is what makes

literature matter. And if you do it well, what you say will invite

its own response: your “I say” will become someone else’s “they

say,” and the conversation will go on and on.

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202

SIXTEEN

“the data suggest”

Writing in the Sciences

CHRISTOPHER GILLEN

Charles Darwin described On the Origin of Species as

“one long argument.” In Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief

World Systems, Galileo Galilei cast his argument for a sun-

centered solar system as a series of conversations. As these

historical examples show, scientific writing is fundamentally

argumentative. Like all academic writers, scientists make and

defend claims. They address disagreements and explore unan-

swered questions. They propose novel mechanisms and new

theories. And they advance certain explanations and reject

others. Though their vocabulary may be more technical and

their emphasis more numerical, science writers use the same

Christopher Gillen is a professor of biology at Kenyon College

and the faculty director of the Kenyon Institute in Biomedical and

Scientific Writing. He teaches courses in animal physiology, biology

of exercise, and introductory biology, all stressing the critical reading

of primary research articles.

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Writing in the Sciences

203

rhetorical moves as other academic writers. Consider the fol-

lowing example from a book about the laws of physics.

The common refrain that is heard in elementary discussions of

quantum mechanics is that a physical object is in some sense both

a wave and a particle, with its wave nature apparent when you

measure a wave property such as wavelength, and its particle nature

apparent when you measure a particle property such as position.

But this is, at best, misleading and, at worst, wrong.

V. J. Stenger, The Comprehensible Cosmos

The “they say / I say” structure of this passage is unmistak-

able: They say that objects have properties of both waves and

par ticles; I say they are wrong. This example is not a lonely

argumentative passage cherry-picked from an otherwise non-

argumentative text. Rather, Stenger’s entire book makes the

argument that is foreshadowed by its title, The Comprehensible

Cosmos: that although some might see the universe as hope-

lessly complex, it is essentially understandable.

Here’s another argumentative passage, this one from a

research article about the role of lactic acid in muscle fatigue:

In contrast to the often suggested role for acidosis as a cause of mus-

cle fatigue, it is shown that in muscles where force was depressed

by high [K]o, acidification by lactic acid produced a pronounced

recovery of force.

O. B. Nielsen, F. de Paoli, and K. Overgaard,

“Protective Effects of Lactic Acid on Force Production in

Rat Skeletal Muscle,” The Journal of Physiology

In other words: Many scientists think that lactic acid causes

muscle fatigue, but our evidence shows that it actually promotes

recovery. Notice that the authors frame their claim with a ver-

sion of the “they say / I say” formula: Although previous work

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sixteen sixteen “THE DATA SUGGEST”

204

suggests , our data argue . This basic move and

its many variations are widespread in scientific writing. The essen-

tial argumentative moves taught in this book transcend disciplines,

and the sciences are no exception. The examples in this chaper

were written by professional scientists, but they show moves that

are appropriate in any writing that addresses scientific issues.

Despite the importance of argument in scientific writing,

newcomers to the genre often see it solely as a means for com-

municating uncontroversial, objective facts. It’s easy to see how

this view arises. The objective tone of scientific writing can

obscure its argumentative nature, and many textbooks rein-

force a nonargumentative vision of science when they focus on

accepted conclusions and ignore ongoing controversies. And

because science writers base their arguments on empirical data,

a good portion of many scientific texts does serve the purpose

of delivering uncontested facts.

However, scientific writing often does more than just report

facts. Data are crucial to scientific argumentation, but they

are by no means the end of the story. Given important new

data, scientists assess their quality, draw conclusions from them,

and ponder their implications. They synthesize the new data

with existing information, propose novel theories, and design

the next experiments. In short, scientific progress depends on

the insight and creativity that scientists bring to their data. The

thrill of doing science, and writing about it, comes from the

ongoing struggle to use data to better understand our world.

start with the data

Data are the fundamental currency of scientific argument.

Scientists develop hypotheses from existing data and then test

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Writing in the Sciences

205

those by comparing their predictions to new experimental data.

Summarizing data is therefore a basic move in science writ-

ing. Because data can often be interpreted in different ways,

describing the data opens the door to critical analysis, creating

opportunities to critique previous interpretations and develop

new ones.

Describing data requires more than simply reporting

numbers and conclusions. Rather than jumping straight

to the punch line—to what X concluded—it is impor-

tant first to describe the hypotheses, methods, and results that

led to the conclusion: “To test the hypothesis that ,

X measured and found that . Therefore, X

concluded .” In the following sections, we explore the

three key rhetorical moves for describing the data that under-

pin a scientific argument: presenting the prevailing theories,

explaining methodologies, and summarizing findings.

Present the Prevailing Theories

Readers must understand the prevailing theories that a study

responds to before they can fully appreciate the details. So before

diving into specifics, place the work in context by describing

the prevailing theories and hypotheses. In the following pas-

sage from a journal article about insect respiration, the authors

discuss an explanation for discontinuous gas exchange (DGC),

a phenomenon where insects periodically close valves on their

breathing tubes.

Lighton (1996, 1998; see also Lighton and Berrigan, 1995) noted

the prevalence of DGC in fossorial insects, which inhabit micro-

climates where CO2 levels may be relatively high. Consequently,

Lighton proposed the chthonic hypothesis, which suggests that

See how a

physicist begins

with data on

pp. 252–59.

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sixteen sixteen “THE DATA SUGGEST”

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DGC originated as a mechanism to improve gas exchange while

at the same time minimizing respiratory water loss.

A. G. Gibbs and R. A. Johnson, “The Role of Discontinuous

Gas Exchange in Insects: The Chthonic Hypothesis Does Not

Hold Water,” The Journal of Experimental Biology

Notice that Gibbs and Johnson not only describe Lighton’s

hypothesis but also recap the evidence that supports it. By

presenting this evidence, Gibbs and Johnson set the stage for

engaging with Lighton’s ideas. For example, they might ques-

tion the chthonic hypothesis by pointing out shortcomings of

the data or flaws in its interpretation. Or they might suggest

new approaches that could verify the hypothesis. The point is

that by incorporating a discussion of experimental findings into

their summary of Lighton’s hypothesis, Gibbs and Johnson open

the door to a conversation with Lighton.

Here are some templates for presenting the data that under-

pin prevailing explanations:

j Experiments showing and have led scien-

tists to propose .

j Although most scientists attribute to , X’s

result leads to the possibility that .

Explain the Methods

Even as we’ve argued that scientific arguments hinge on data, it’s

important to note that the quality of data varies depending on

how they were collected. Data obtained with sloppy techniques

or poorly designed experiments could lead to faulty conclusions.

Therefore, it’s crucial to explain the methods used to collect data.

In order for readers to evaluate a method, you’ll need to indicate

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Writing in the Sciences

207

its purpose, as the following passage from a journal article about

the evolution of bird digestive systems demonstrates:

To test the hypothesis that flowerpiercers have converged with hum-

mingbirds in digestive traits, we compared the activity of intestinal

enzymes and the gut nominal area of cinnamon-bellied flowerpierc-

ers (Diglossa baritula) with those of eleven hummingbird species.

J. E. Schondube and C. Martinez del Rio,

“Sugar and Protein Digestion in Flowerpiercers and

Hummingbirds: A Comparative Test of Adaptive Convergence,”

Journal of Comparative Physiology

You need to indicate purpose whether describing your own work

or that of others. Here are a couple of templates for doing so:

j Smith and colleagues evaluated to determine

whether .

j Because does not account for , we instead

used .

Summarize the Findings

Scientific data often come in the form of numbers. Your task

when presenting numerical data is to provide the context read-

ers need to understand the numbers—by giving supporting

information and making comparisons. In the following pas-

sage from a book about the interaction between organisms and

their environments, Turner uses numerical data to support an

argument about the role of the sun’s energy on Earth.

The potential rate of energy transfer from the Sun to Earth is

prodigious—about 600 W m–2, averaged throughout the year. Of

this, only a relatively small fraction, on the order of 1–2 percent,

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sixteen sixteen “THE DATA SUGGEST”

208

is captured by green plants. The rest, if it is not reflected back

into space, is available to do other things. The excess can be con-

siderable: although some natural surfaces reflect as much as 95%

of the incoming solar beam, many natural surfaces reflect much

less (Table 3.2), on average about 15–20 percent. The remaining

absorbed energy is then capable of doing work, like heating up

surfaces, moving water and air masses around to drive weather and

climate, evaporating water, and so forth.

J. S. Turner, The Extended Organism

Turner supports his point that a huge amount of the sun’s

energy is directly converted to work on Earth by quoting an

actual value (600) with units of measurement (W m–2, watts

per square meter). Readers need the units to evaluate the value;

600 watts per square inch is very different from 600 W m–2.

Turner then makes comparisons using percent values, saying

that only 1 to 2 percent of the total energy that reaches Earth

is trapped by plants. Finally, Turner describes the data’s vari-

ability by reporting comparisons as ranges—1 to 2 percent and

15 to 20 percent—rather than single values.

Supporting information—such as units of measurement,

sample size (n), and amount of variability—helps readers assess

the data. In general, the reliability of data improves as its sample

size increases and its variability decreases. Supporting informa-

tion can be concisely presented as:

j  (mean ± variability) (units),

n  (sample size).

For example: Before training, resting heart rate of the subjects

was 56  7 beats per minute, n  12. Here’s another way to

give supporting information:

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Writing in the Sciences

209

j We measured (sample size) subjects, and the average

response was (mean with units) with a range of

(lower value) to (upper value).

To help readers understand the data, make comparisons with

values from the same study or from other similar work.

Here are some templates for making comparisons:

j Before training, average running speed was 

kilometers per hour, kilometers per hour

slower than running speed after training.

j We found athletes’ heart rates to be  %

lower than nonathletes’.

j The subjects in X’s study completed the maze in 

seconds, seconds slower than those in

Y’s study.

You will sometimes need to present qualitative data, such as

that found in some images and photographs, that cannot be

reduced to numbers. Qualitative data must be described pre-

cisely with words. In the passage below from a review article

about connections between cellular protein localization and

cell growth, the author describes the exact locations of three

proteins: Scrib, Dlg, and Lgl.

Epithelial cells accumulate different proteins on their apical (top)

and basolateral (bottom) surfaces. . . . Scrib and Dlg are localized

at the septate junctions along the lateral cell surface, whereas Lgl

coats vesicles that are found both in the cytoplasm and “docked”

at the lateral surface of the cell.

M. Peifer, “Travel Bulletin—Traffic Jams

Cause Tumors,” Science

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sixteen sixteen “THE DATA SUGGEST”

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explain what the data mean

Once you summarize experiments and results, you need to say

what the data mean. Consider the following passage from a

study in which scientists fertilized plots of tropical rainforest

with nitrogen (N) and / or phosphorus (P).

Although our data suggest that the mechanisms driving the

observed respiratory responses to increased N and P may be dif-

ferent, the large CO2 losses stimulated by N and P fertilization

suggest that knowledge of such patterns and their effects on soil

CO2 efflux is critical for understanding the role of tropical forests

in a rapidly changing global C [carbon] cycle.

C. C. Cleveland and A. R. Townsend, “Nutrient

Additions to a Tropical Rain Forest Drive Substantial

Soil Carbon Dioxide Losses to the Atmosphere,”

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Notice that in discussing the implications of their data, Cleve-

land and Townsend use language—including the verbs “sug-

gest” and “may be”—that denotes their level of confidence in

what they say about the data.

Whether you are summarizing what others say about their

data or offering your own interpretation, pay attention to the

verbs that connect data to interpretations.

To signify a moderate level of confidence:

j The data suggest / hint / imply .

To express a greater degree of certainty:

j Our results show / demonstrate .

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Writing in the Sciences

211

Almost never will you use the verb “prove” in reference to a

single study, because even very powerful evidence generally falls

short of proof unless other studies support the same conclusion.

Scientific consensus arises when multiple studies point

toward the same conclusion; conversely, contradictions among

studies often signal research questions that need further work.

For these reasons, you may need to compare one study’s findings

to those of another study. Here, too, you’ll need to choose your

verbs carefully.

j Our data support / confirm / verify the work of X by showing

that .

j By demonstrating , X’s work extends the findings of Y.

j The results of X contradict / refute Y’s conclusion that .

j X’s findings call into question the widely accepted theory

that .

j Our data are consistent with X’s hypothesis that .

make your own arguments

Now we turn toward the part of scientific writing where you

express your own opinions. One challenge is that the statements

of other scientists about their methods and results usually must be

accepted. You probably can’t argue, for example, that “X and Y

claim to have studied 6 elephants, but I think they actually only

studied 4.” However, it might be fair to say, “X and Y studied only

6 elephants, and this small sample size casts doubts on their conclu-

sions.” The second statement doesn’t question what the scientists

did or found but instead examines how the findings are interpreted.

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sixteen sixteen “THE DATA SUGGEST”

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When developing your own arguments—the “I say”—you

will often start by assessing the interpretations of other scientists.

Consider the following example from a review article about the

beneficial acclimation hypothesis (BAH), the idea that organ-

isms exposed to a particular environment become better suited

to that environment than unexposed animals.

To the surprise of most physiologists, all empirical examinations

of the BAH have rejected its generality. However, we suggest that

these examinations are neither direct nor complete tests of the

functional benefit of acclimation.

R. S. Wilson and C. E. Franklin, “Testing the Beneficial

Acclimation Hypothesis,” Trends in Ecology & Evolution

Wilson and Franklin use a version of the “twist it” move:

They acknowledge the data collected by other physiolo-

gists but question how those data have been inter-

preted, creating an opportunity to offer their own

interpretation.

You might ask whether we should question how other

scientists interpret their own work. Having conducted a study,

aren’t they in the best position to evaluate it? Perhaps, but

as the above example demonstrates, other scientists might see

the work from a different perspective or through more objec-

tive eyes. And in fact the culture of science depends on vigor-

ous debate in which scientists defend their own findings and

challenge those of others—a give and take that helps improve

science’s reliability. So expressing a critical view about someone

else’s work is an integral part of the scientific process. Let’s

examine some of the basic moves for entering scientific conver-

sations: agreeing, with a difference; disagreeing and explaining

why; simultaneously agreeing and disagreeing; anticipating

objections; and saying why it matters.

For more on

the “twist it”

move, see

p. 60.

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Writing in the Sciences

213

Agree, But with a Difference

Scientific research passes through several levels of critical analy-

sis before being published. Scientists get feedback when they

discuss work with colleagues, present findings at conferences,

and receive reviews of their manuscripts. So the juiciest debates

may have been resolved before publication, and you may find

little to disagree with in the published literature of a research

field. Yet even if you agree with what you’ve read, there are still

ways to join the conversation—and reasons to do so.

One approach is to suggest that further work should be done:

j Now that has been established, scientists will likely

turn their attention toward .

j X’s work leads to the question of . Therefore, we

investigated .

j To see whether these findings apply to , we propose

to .

Another way to agree and at the same time jump into the

conversation is to concur with a finding and then propose a

mechanism that explains it. In the following sentence from a

review article about dietary deficiencies, the author agrees with

a previous finding and offers a probable explanation.

Inadequate dietary intakes of vitamins and minerals are widespread,

most likely due to excessive consumption of energy-rich, micronu-

trient-poor, refined food.

B. Ames, “Low Micronutrient Intake

May Accelerate the Degenerative Diseases of Aging through

Allocation of Scarce Micronutrients by Triage,”

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

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sixteen sixteen “THE DATA SUGGEST”

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Here are some templates for explaining an experimental result.

j One explanation for X’s finding of is that .

An alternative explanation is .

j The difference between and is probably

due to .

Disagree—and Explain Why

Although scientific consensus is common, healthy disagree-

ment is not unusual. While measurements conducted by dif-

ferent teams of scientists under the same conditions should

produce the same result, scientists often disagree about which

techniques are most appropriate, how well an experimental

design tests a hypothesis, and how results should be inter-

preted. To illustrate such disagreement, let’s return to the

debate about whether or not lactic acid is beneficial during

exercise. In the following passage, Lamb and Stephenson

are responding to work by Kristensen and colleagues, which

argues that lactic acid might be beneficial to resting muscle

but not to active muscle.

The argument put forward by Kristensen and colleagues (12) . . .

is not valid because it is based on observations made with isolated

whole soleus muscles that were stimulated at such a high rate that

60% of the preparation would have rapidly become completely

anoxic (4). . . . Furthermore, there is no reason to expect that

adding more H+ to that already being generated by the muscle

activity should in any way be advantageous. It is a bit like open-

ing up the carburetor on a car to let in too much air or throwing

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Writing in the Sciences

215

gasoline over the engine and then concluding that air and gasoline

are deleterious to engine performance.

G. D. Lamb and D. G. Stephenson,

“Point: Lactic Acid Accumulation Is an Advantage during

Muscle Activity,” Journal of Applied Physiology

Lamb and Stephenson bring experimental detail to bear on

their disagreement with Kristensen and colleagues. First, they

criticize methodology, arguing that the high muscle stimulation

rate used by Kristensen and colleagues created very low oxygen

levels (anoxia). They also criticize the logic of the experimental

design, arguing that adding more acid (H+) to a muscle that

is already producing it isn’t informative. It’s also worth noting

how they drive home their point, likening Kristensen and col-

leagues’ methodology to flooding an engine with air or gasoline.

Even in technical scientific writing, you don’t need to set aside

your own voice completely.

In considering the work of others, look for instances where

the experimental design and methodology fail to adequately

test a hypothesis.

j The work of Y and Z appears to show that , but their

experimental design does not control for .

Also, consider the possibility that results do not lead to the

stated conclusions.

j While X and Y claim that , their finding of

actually shows that .

Okay, But . . .

Science tends to progress incrementally. New work may refine

or extend previous work but doesn’t often completely overturn

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sixteen sixteen “THE DATA SUGGEST”

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it. For this reason, science writers frequently agree up to a point

and then express some disagreement. In the following example

from a commentary about methods for assessing how proteins

interact, the authors acknowledge the value of the two-hybrid

studies, but they also point out their shortcomings.

The two-hybrid studies that produced the protein interaction map

for D. melanogaster (12) provide a valuable genome-wide view

of protein interactions but have a number of shortcomings (13).

Even if the protein-protein interactions were determined with

high accuracy, the resulting network would still require careful

interpretation to extract its underlying biological meaning. Spe-

cifically, the map is a representation of all possible interactions,

but one would only expect some fraction to be operating at any

given time.

J. J. Rice, A. Kershenbaum, and G. Stolovitzky,

“Lasting Impressions: Motifs in Protein-Protein Maps

May Provide Footprints of Evolutionary Events.”

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Delineating the boundaries or limitations of a study is a good

way to agree up to a point. Here are templates for doing so.

j While X’s work clearly demonstrates , will

be required before we can determine whether .

j Although Y and Z present firm evidence for , their data

can not be used to argue that .

j In summary, our studies show that , but the issue of

remains unresolved.

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Writing in the Sciences

217

Anticipate Objections

Skepticism is a key ingredient in the scientific process. Before

an explanation is accepted, scientists demand convincing evi-

dence and assess whether alternative explanations have been

thoroughly explored, so it’s essential that scientists consider

possible objections to their ideas before presenting them. In

the following example from a book about the origin of the

universe, Tyson and Goldsmith first admit that some might

doubt the existence of the poorly understood “dark matter”

that physicists have proposed, and then they go on to respond

to the skeptics.

Unrelenting skeptics might compare the dark matter of today with

the hypothetical, now defunct “ether,” proposed centuries ago as

the weightless, transparent medium through which light moved.

. . . But dark matter ignorance differs fundamentally from ether

ignorance. While ether amounted to a placeholder for our incom-

plete understanding, the existence of dark matter derives from not

from mere presumption but from the observed effects of its gravity

on visible matter.

N. D. Tyson and D. Goldsmith,

Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution

Anticipating objections in your own writing will help you

clarify and address potential criticisms. Consider objections to

your overall approach, as well as to specific aspects of your

interpretations. Here are some templates for doing so.

j Scientists who take a (reductionist / integrative /

biochemical / computational / statistical) approach might view

our results differently.

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sixteen sixteen “THE DATA SUGGEST”

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j This interpretation of the data might be criticized by X, who has

argued that .

j Some may argue that this experimental design fails to account

for .

Say Why It Matters

Though individual studies can be narrowly focused, science

ultimately seeks to answer big questions and produce useful

technologies. So it’s essential when you enter a scientific con-

versation to say why the work—and your arguments about it—

matter. The following passage from a commentary on a research

article notes two implications of work that evaluated the shape

of electron orbitals.

The classic textbook shape of electron orbitals has now been

directly observed. As well as confirming the established theory,

this work may be a first step to understanding high-temperature

superconductivity.

C. J. Humphreys, “Electrons Seen in Orbit,” Nature

Humphreys argues that the study confirms an established theory

and that it may lead to better understanding in another area.

When thinking about the broad significance of a study, con-

sider both the practical applications and the impact on future

scientific work.

j These results open the door to studies that .

j The methodologies developed by X will be useful for .

j Our findings are the first step toward .

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Writing in the Sciences

219

j Further work in this area may lead to the development of

reading as a way of entering

scientific conversations

In science, as in other disciplines, you’ll often start with work

done by others, and therefore you will need to critically evalu-

ate their work. To that end, you’ll need to probe how well

their data support their interpretations. Doing so will lead you

toward your own interpretations—your ticket into an ongoing

scientific conversation. Here are some questions that will help

you read and respond to scientific research.

How well do the methods test the hypothesis?

• Is the sample size adequate?

• Is the experimental design valid?

Were the proper controls performed?

• What are the limitations of the methodology?

• Are other techniques available?

How fairly have the results been interpreted?

• How well do the results support the stated conclusion?

• Has the data’s variability been adequately considered?

• Do other findings verify (or contradict) the conclusion?

• What other experiments could test the conclusion?

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sixteen sixteen “THE DATA SUGGEST”

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What are the broader implications of the work, and why does

it matter?

• Can the results be generalized beyond the system

that was studied?

• What are the work’s practical implications?

• What questions arise from the work?

• Which experiments should be done next?

The examples in this chapter show that scientists do more

than simply collect facts; they also interpret those facts and

make arguments about their meaning. On the frontiers of sci-

ence, where we are probing questions that are just beyond our

capacity to answer, the data are inevitably incomplete and

controversy is to be expected. Writing about science presents

the opportunity to add your own arguments to the ongoing

discussion.

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221

SEVENTEEN

“analyze this”

Writing in the Social Sciences

ERIN ACKERMAN

Social science is the study of people—how they behave

and relate to one another, and the organizations and institu-

tions that facilitate these interactions. People are complicated,

so any study of human behavior is at best partial, taking into

account some elements of what people do and why, but not

always explaining those actions definitively. As a result, it is

the subject of constant conversation and argument.

Consider some of the topics studied in the social sciences:

minimum wage laws, immigration policy, health care, employ-

ment discrimination. Got an opinion on any of these topics?

You aren’t alone. But in the writing you do as a student of the

social sciences, you need to write about more than just your

Erin Ackerman is the Social Sciences Librarian at the College of

New Jersey and formerly taught political science at John Jay College,

City University of New York. Her research and teaching interests

include women and American law, the law and politics of reproductive

health, and information literacy in the social sciences.

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seventeen seventeen “ANALYZE THIS”

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opinions. Good writing in the social sciences, as in other aca-

demic disciplines, requires that you demonstrate that you have

thought about what it is you think. The best way to do that is

to bring your views into conversation with those expressed by

others and to test what you and others think against a review

of data. In other words, you’ll need to start with what others

say and then present what you say as a response.

Consider the following example from a book about contem-

porary American political culture:

Claims of deep national division were standard fare after the

2000 elections, and to our knowledge few commentators have

publicly challenged them. . . . In sum, contemporary observers of

American politics have apparently reached a new consensus around

the proposition that old disagreements about economics now pale

in comparison to new divisions based on sexuality, morality, and

religion, divisions so deep as to justify fears of violence and talk of

war in describing them.

This short book advocates a contrary thesis: the sentiments

expressed in the previously quoted pronouncements of scholars,

journalists, and politicos range from simple exaggeration to sheer

nonsense. . . . Many of the activists in the political parties and vari-

ous cause groups do, in fact, hate each other and regard themselves

as combatants in a war. But their hatreds and battles are not shared

by the great mass of the American people. . . .

Morris P. Fiorina, Culture War?

The Myth of a Polarized America

In other words, “they” (journalists, pundits, other political

scientists) say that the American public is deeply divided,

whereas Fiorina replies that they have misinterpreted the

evidence—specifically, that they have generalized from a few

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Writing in the Social Sciences

223

exceptional cases (activists). Even the title of the book calls into

question an idea held by others, one Fiorina labels a “myth.”

This chapter explores some of the basic moves social sci-

ence writers make. In addition, writing in the social sciences

generally includes several core components: a strong intro-

duction and thesis, a literature review, and the writer’s own

analysis, including presentation of data and consideration of

implications. Much of your own writing will include one or

more of these components as well. The introduction sets out the

thesis, or point, of the paper, briefly explaining what you will

say in your text and how it fits into the preexisting conversa-

tion. The literature review summarizes what has already been

said on your topic. Your analysis allows you to present data—the

information about human behavior you are measuring or test-

ing against what other people have said—and to explain the

conclusions you have drawn based on your investigation. Do

you agree, disagree, or some combination of both, with what

has been said by others? What reasons can you give for why

you feel that way? And so what? Who should be interested in

what you have to say, and why?

the introduction and thesis:

“this paper challenges . . .”

Your introduction sets forth what you plan to say in your

essay. You might evaluate the work of earlier scholars or cer-

tain widely held assumptions and find them incorrect when

measured against new data. Alternatively, you might point out

that an author’s work is largely correct, but that it could use

some qualifications or be extended in some way. Or you might

identify a gap in our knowledge—we know a great deal about

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seventeen seventeen “ANALYZE THIS”

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topic X but almost nothing about some other closely related

topic. In each of these instances, your introduction needs to

cover both “they say” and “I say” perspectives. If you stop after

the “they say,” your readers won’t know what you are bringing

to the conversation. Similarly, if you were to jump right to the

“I say” portion of your argument, readers might wonder why

you need to say anything at all.

Sometimes you join the conversation at a point where the

discussion seems settled. One or more views about a topic have

become so widely accepted among a group of scholars or society

at large that these views are essentially the conventional way of

thinking about the topic. You may wish to offer new reasons to

support this interpretation, or you may wish to call these standard

views into question. To do so, you must first introduce and iden-

tify these widely held beliefs and then pre sent your own view. In

fact, much of the writing in the social sciences takes the form

of calling into question that which we think we already know.

Consider the following example from an article in The Journal

of Economic Perspectives:

Fifteen years ago, Milton Friedman’s 1957 treatise A Theory of the

Consumption Function seemed badly dated. Dynamic optimization

theory had not been employed much in economics when Fried-

man wrote, and utility theory was still comparatively primitive, so

his statement of the “permanent income hypothesis” never actu-

ally specified a formal mathematical model of behavior derived

explicitly from utility maximization . . . [W]hen other economists

subsequently found multiperiod maximizing models that could be

solved explicitly, the implications of those models differed sharply

from Friedman’s intuitive description of his “model.” Furthermore,

empirical tests in the 1970s and 1980s often rejected these rigor-

ous versions of the permanent income hypothesis in favor of an

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Writing in the Social Sciences

225

alternative hypothesis that many households simply spent all of

their current income.

Today, with the benefit of a further round of mathematical (and

computational) advances, Friedman’s (1957) original analysis looks

more prescient than primitive . . .

Christopher D. Carroll, “A Theory of Consumption

Function, With and Without Liquidity Constraints,”

The Journal of Economic Perspectives

This introduction makes clear that Carroll will defend Milton

Friedman against some major criticisms of his work. Carroll

mentions what has been said about Friedman’s work and then

goes on to say that the critiques turn out to be wrong and to

suggest that Friedman’s work reemerges as persuasive. A tem-

plate of Carroll’s introduction might look something like this:

Economics research in the last fifteen years suggested Fried-

man’s 1957 treatise was because . In other

words, they say that Friedman’s work is not accurate because

of , , and . Recent research

convinces me, however, that Friedman’s work makes sense.

In some cases, however, there may not be a strong consensus

among experts on a topic. You might enter the ongoing debate

by casting your vote with one side or another or by offering an

alternative view. In the following example, Shari Berman iden-

tifies two competing accounts of how to explain world events

in the twentieth century and then puts forth a third view.

Conventional wisdom about twentieth-century ideologies rests on

two simple narratives. One focuses on the struggle for dominance

between democracy and its alternatives. . . . The other narrative

focuses on the competition between free-market capitalism and its

rivals. . . . Both of these narratives obviously contain some truth.

. . . Yet both only tell part of the story, which is why their common

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conclusion—neoliberalism as the “end of History”—is unsatisfying

and misleading.

What the two conventional narratives fail to mention is that

a third struggle was also going on: between those ideologies that

believed in the primacy of economics and those that believed in

the primacy of politics.

Shari Berman, “The Primacy of Economics versus the

Primacy of Politics: Understanding the Ideological Dynamics

of the Twentieth Century,” Perspectives on Politics

After identifying the two competing narratives, Berman sug-

gests a third view—and later goes on to argue that this third

view explains current debates over globalization. A template

for this type of introduction might look something like this:

In recent discussions of , a controversial aspect has

been . On the one hand, some argue that .

On the other hand, others argue that . Neither of

these arguments, however, considers the alternative view

that .

Given the complexity of many of the issues studied in the

social sciences, however, you may sometimes agree and disagree

with existing views—pointing out things that you believe are

correct or have merit, while disagreeing with or refin-

ing other points. In the example below, anthropologist

Sally Engle Merry agrees with another scholar about

something that is a key trait of modern society but argues

that this trait has a different origin than the other author

identifies.

Although I agree with Rose that an increasing emphasis on

governing the soul is characteristic of modern society, I see the

For more on

different ways

of responding,

see Chapter 4.

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Writing in the Social Sciences

227

transformation not as evolutionary but as the product of social

mobilization and political struggle.

Sally Engle Merry, “Rights, Religion, and Community:

Approaches to Violence against Women in the

Context of Globalization,” Law and Society Review

Here are some templates for agreeing and disagreeing:

j Although I agree with X up to a point, I cannot accept his overall

conclusion that .

j Although I disagree with X on and , I agree

with her conclusion that .

j Political scientists studying have argued that it

is caused by . While contributes to the

problem, is also an important factor.

In the process of examining people from different angles,

social scientists sometimes identify gaps—areas that have not

been explored in previous research. In an article on African

American neighborhoods, sociologist Mary Pattillo identifies

such a gap.

The research on African Americans is dominated by inquiries into

the lives of the black poor. Contemporary ethnographies and jour-

nalistic descriptions have thoroughly described deviance, gangs,

drugs, intergender relations and sexuality, stymied aspiration, and

family patterns in poor neighborhoods (Dash 1989; Hagedorn 1988;

Kotlowitz 1991; Lemann 1991; MacLeoad 1995; Sullivan 1989;

Williams 1989). Yet, the majority of African Americans are not

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poor (Billingsley 1992). A significant part of the black experience,

namely that of working and middle-class blacks, remains unex-

plored. We have little information about what black middle-class

neighborhoods look like and how social life is organized within

them. . . . this article begins to fill this empirical and theoretical

gap using ethnographic data collected in Groveland, a middle-class

black neighborhood in Chicago.

Mary E. Pattillo,

“Sweet Mothers and Gangbangers: Managing Crime

in a Black Middle-Class Neighborhood,” Social Forces

Pattillo explains that much has been said about poor African

American neighborhoods. But, she says, we have little infor-

mation about the experience of working-class and middle-class

black neighborhoods—a gap that her article will address.

Here are some templates for introducing gaps in the existing

research:

j Studies of X have indicated . It is not clear, however,

that this conclusion applies to .

j often take for granted that . Few have

investigated this assumption, however.

j X’s work tells us a great deal about . Can this work

be generalized to ?

Again, a good introduction indicates what you have to say in

the larger context of what others have said. Throughout the

rest of your paper, you will move back and forth between the

“they say” and the “I say,” adding more details.

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229

the literature review:

“prior research indicates . . .”

In the literature review, you explain what “they say” in more

detail, summarizing, paraphrasing, or quoting the viewpoints

to which you are responding. But you need to balance what

they are saying with your own focus. You need to characterize

someone else’s work fairly and accurately but set up the points

you yourself want to make by selecting the details that are

relevant to your own perspective and observations.

It is common in the social sciences to summarize several

arguments at once, identifying their major arguments or find-

ings in a single paragraph.

How do employers in a low-wage labor market respond to an increase

in the minimum wage? The prediction from conventional economic

theory is unambiguous: a rise in the minimum wage leads perfectly

competitive employers to cut employment (George J. Stigler, 1946).

Although studies in the 1970’s based on aggregate teenage employ-

ment rates usually confirmed this prediction, earlier studies based

on comparisons of employment at affected and unaffected establish-

ments often did not (e.g., Richard A. Lester, 1960, 1964). Several

recent studies that rely on a similar comparative methodology have

failed to detect a negative employment effect of higher minimum

wages. Analyses of the 1990–1991 increases in the federal minimum

wage (Lawrence F. Katz and Krueger, 1992; Card, 1992a) and of an

earlier increase in the minimum wage in California (Card, 1992b)

find no adverse employment impact.

David Card and Alan Krueger,

“Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the

Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania,”

The American Economic Review

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Card and Krueger cite the key findings and conclusions of works

that are relevant to the question they are investigating and

the point they plan to address, asking “How do employers in

a low-wage labor market respond to an increase in the mini-

mum wage?” They go on, as good writers should, to answer the

question they ask. And they do so by reviewing others who

have answered that question, noting that this question has been

answered in different, sometimes contradictory, ways.

Such summaries are brief, bringing together relevant argu-

ments by several scholars to provide an overview of scholarly

work on a particular topic. In writing such a summary, you need

to ask yourself how the authors themselves might describe their

positions and also consider what in their work is relevant for

the point you wish to make. This kind of summary is especially

appropriate when you have a large amount of research material

on a topic and want to identify the major strands of a debate or

to show how the work of one author builds on that of another.

Here are some templates for overview summaries:

j In addressing the question of , political scientists

have considered several explanations for . X argues

that . According to Y and Z, another plausible expla-

nation is .

j What is the effect of on ? Previous work

on by X and by Y and Z supports .

Sometimes you may need to say more about the works you

cite. On a midterm or final exam, for example, you may need

to demonstrate that you have a deep familiarity with a par-

ticular work. And in some disciplines of the social sciences,

longer, more detailed literature reviews are the standard. Your

instructor and the articles he or she has assigned are your best

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Writing in the Social Sciences

231

guides for the length and level of detail of your literature review.

Other times, the work of certain authors is especially important

for your argument, and therefore you need to provide more

details to explain what these authors have said. See how Martha

Derthick summarizes an argument that is central to her book

about the politics of tobacco regulation.

The idea that governments could sue to reclaim health care costs

from cigarette manufacturers might be traced to “Cigarettes and

Welfare Reform,” an article published in the Emory Law Journal

in 1977 by Donald Gasner, a law professor at the University of

Southern Illinois. Garner suggested that state governments could

get a cigarette manufacturer to pay the direct medical costs “of

looking after patients with smoking diseases.” He drew an analogy

to the Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969, under which coal

mine operators are required to pay certain disability benefits for

coal miners suffering from pneumoconiosis, or black lung disease.

Martha Derthick, Up In Smoke:

From Legislation to Litigation in Tobacco Politics

Note that Derthick identifies the argument she is summariz-

ing, quoting its author directly and then adding details about

a precedent for the argument.

You may want to include direct quotations of what others

have said, as Derthick does. Using an author’s exact words

helps you demonstrate that you are representing him or her

fairly. But you cannot simply insert a quotation; you need to

explain to your readers what it means for your point. Consider

the following example drawn from a political science book on

the debate over tort reform.

The essence of agenda setting was well enunciated by E. E.

Schattschneider: “In politics as in everything else, it makes a great

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difference whose game we play” (1960, 47). In short, the ability to

define or control the rules, terms, or perceived options in a contest

over policy greatly affects the prospects for winning.

William Haltom and Michael McCann,

Distorting the Law: Politics, Media, and the Litigation Crisis

Notice how Haltom and McCann first quote Schattschneider

and then explain in their own words how political agenda set-

ting can be thought of as a game, with winners and losers.

Remember that whenever you summarize, quote, or paraphrase

the work of others, credit must be given in the form of a citation

to the original work. The words may be your own, but if the idea

comes from someone else you must give credit to the original

work. There are several formats for documenting sources. Consult

your instructor for help choosing which citation style to use.

the analysis

The literature review covers what others have said on your

topic. The analysis allows you to present and support your own

response. In the introduction you indicate whether you agree,

disagree, or some combination of both with what others have

said. You will want to expand on how you have formed your

opinion and why others should care about your topic.

“The Data Indicate . . .”

The social sciences use data to develop and test explanations.

Data can be quantitative or qualitative and can come from a

number of sources. You might use statistics related to GDP

growth, unemployment, voting rates, or demographics. Or you

could use surveys, interviews, or other first-person accounts.

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Regardless of the type of data used, it is important to do

three things: define your data, indicate where you got the data,

and then say what you have done with your data. In a journal

article, political scientist Joshua C. Wilson examines a court

case about protests at an abortion clinic and asks whether each

side of the conflict acts in a way consistent with their general

views on freedom of speech.

[T]his paper relies on close readings of in-person, semi-structured

interviews with the participants involved in the real controversy

that was the Williams case.

Thirteen interviews ranging in length from 40 minutes to

1 hour and 50 minutes were conducted for this paper. Of those

interviewed, all would be considered “elites” in terms of political

psychology / political attitude research—six were active members

of Solano Citizens for Life . . . ; two were members of Planned

Parenthood Shasta-Diablo management; one was the lawyer who

obtained the restraining order, temporary injunction, and perma-

nent injunction for Planned Parenthood; one was the lawyer for

the duration of the case for Solano Citizens for Life; two were

lawyers for Planned Parenthood on appeal; and one was the Supe-

rior Court judge who heard arguments for, and finally crafted, the

restraining order and injunctions against Solano Citizens for Life.

During the course of the interviews, participants were asked a range

of questions about their experiences and thoughts in relation to

the Williams case, as well as their beliefs about the interpretation

and limits of the First Amendment right to free speech—both in

general, and in relation to the Williams case.

Joshua C. Wilson. “When Rights Collide:

Anti-Abortion Protests and the Ideological Dilemma

in Planned Parenthood Shasta-Diablo, Inc. v. Williams,”

Studies in Law, Politics, and Society

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seventeen seventeen “ANALYZE THIS”

234

Wilson identifies and describes his qualitative data—interviews

conducted with key parties in the conflict—and explains the

nature of the questions he asked.

If your data are quantitative, you will need to explain them

similarly. See how political scientist Brian Arbour explains the

quantitative data he used to study for an article in The Forum

how a change of rules might have affected the outcome of the

2008 Democratic primary contest between Hillary Clinton and

Barack Obama.

I evaluate these five concerns about the Democratic system of

delegate allocation by “rerunning” the Obama-Clinton contest

with a different set of allocation rules, those in effect for the 2008

Republican presidential contest. . . . Republicans allow each state

to make their own rules, leading to “a plethora of selection plans”

(Shapiro & Bello 2008, 5) . . . To “rerun” the Democratic pri-

mary under Republican rules, I need data on the results of the

Democratic primary for each state and congressional district and

on the Republican delegate allocation rules for each state. The

Green Papers (www.thegreenpapers.com), a website that serves as

an almanac of election procedures, rules, and results, provides each

of these data sources. By “rerunning” the Democratic primaries and

caucuses, I use the exact results of each contest.

Brian Arbour, “Even Closer, Even Longer: What If the 2008

Democratic Primary Used Republican Rules?” The Forum

Note that Arbour identifies his data as primary voting results

and the rules for Republican primaries. In the rest of the paper,

Arbour shows how his use of these data suggests that political

commentators who thought Republican rules would have clari-

fied the close race between Clinton and Obama were wrong

and the race would have been “even closer, even longer.”

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Writing in the Social Sciences

235

Here are some templates for discussing data:

j In order to test the hypothesis that , we assessed

. Our calculations suggest .

j I used to investigate . The results of this

investigation indicate .

“But Others May Object . . .”

No matter how strongly your data support your argument, there

are almost surely other perspectives (and thus other data) that

you need to acknowledge. By considering possible objections

to your argument and taking them seriously, you demonstrate

that you’ve done your work and that you’re aware of other

perspectives—and most important, you present your own argu-

ment as part of an ongoing conversation.

See how economist Christopher Carroll acknowledges that

there may be objections to his argument about how people

allocate their income between consumption and savings.

I have argued here that the modern version of the dynamically opti-

mizing consumption model is able to match many of the important

features of the empirical data on consumption and saving behavior.

There are, however, several remaining reasons for discomfort with

the model.

Christopher D. Carroll, “A Theory of Consumption

Function, With and Without Liquidity Constraints,”

The Journal of Economic Perspectives

Carroll then goes on to identify the possible limitations of his

mathematical analysis.

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seventeen seventeen “ANALYZE THIS”

236

Someone may object because there are related phenomena

that your analysis does not explain or because you do not have

the right data to investigate a particular question. Or perhaps

someone may object to assumptions underlying your argument

or how you handled your data. Here are some templates for

considering naysayers:

j might object that .

j Is my claim realistic? I have argued , but readers may

question .

j My explanation accounts for but does not explain

. This is because .

“Why Should We Care?”

Who should care about your research, and why? Since the social

sciences attempt to explain human behavior, it is important to

consider how your research affects the assumptions we make

about human behavior. In addition, you might offer recom-

mendations for how other social scientists might continue to

explore an issue, or what actions policymakers should take.

In the following example, sociologist Devah Pager identi-

fies the implications of her study of the way having a criminal

record affects a person applying for jobs.

[I]n terms of policy implications, this research has troubling con-

clusions. In our frenzy of locking people up, our “crime control”

policies may in fact exacerbate the very conditions that lead to

crime in the first place. Research consistently shows that finding

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Writing in the Social Sciences

237

quality steady employment is one of the strongest predictors of

desistance from crime (Shover 1996; Sampson and Laub 1993;

Uggen 2000). The fact that a criminal record severely limits

employment opportunities—particularly among blacks—suggests

that these individuals are left with few viable alternatives.

Devah Pager, “The Mark of a Criminal Record,”

The American Journal of Sociology

Pager’s conclusion that a criminal record negatively affects

employment chances creates a vicious circle, she says: steady

employment discourages recidivism, but a criminal record

makes it harder to get a job.

In answering the “so what?” question, you need to explain

why your readers should care. Although sometimes the impli-

cations of your work may be so broad that they would be

of interest to almost anyone, it’s never a bad idea to iden-

tify explicitly any groups of people who will find your work

important.

Templates for establishing why your claims matter:

j X is important because .

j Ultimately, what is at stake here is .

j The finding that should be of interest to

because .

As noted at the beginning of this chapter, the complexity of

people allows us to look at their behavior from many different

viewpoints. Much has been, and will be, said about how and

why people do the things they do. As a result, we can look

at writing in the social sciences as an ongoing conversation.

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seventeen seventeen “ANALYZE THIS”

238

When you join this conversation, the “they say / I say” frame-

work will help you figure out what has already been said (they

say) and what you can add (I say). The components of social

science writing presented in this chapter are tools to help you

join that conversation.

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READINGS

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241

Don’t Blame the Eater

DAVID ZINCZENKO

If ever there were a newspaper headline custom-made for

Jay Leno’s monologue, this was it. Kids taking on McDonald’s

this week, suing the company for making them fat. Isn’t that

like middle-aged men suing Porsche for making them get speed-

ing tickets? Whatever happened to personal responsibility?

I tend to sympathize with these portly fast-food patrons,

though. Maybe that’s because I used to be one of them.

I grew up as a typical mid-1980s latchkey kid. My parents

were split up, my dad off trying to rebuild his life, my mom

working long hours to make the monthly bills. Lunch and din-

ner, for me, was a daily choice between McDonald’s, Taco

Bell, Kentucky Fried Chicken or Pizza Hut. Then as now, these

were the only available options for an American kid to get an

affordable meal. By age 15, I had packed 212 pounds of torpid

teenage tallow on my once lanky 5-foot-10 frame.

Then I got lucky. I went to college, joined the Navy Reserves

and got involved with a health magazine. I learned how to

David Zinczenko, who was for many years the editor-in-chief of

the fitness magazine Men’s Health, is president of Galvanized Brands,

a global health and wellness media company. This piece was first pub-

lished on the op-ed page of the New York Times on November 23, 2002.

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DAVID ZINCZENKO

242

manage my diet. But most of the teenagers who live, as I once

did, on a fast-food diet won’t turn their lives around: They’ve

crossed under the golden arches to a likely fate of lifetime obe-

sity. And the problem isn’t just theirs—it’s all of ours.

Before 1994, diabetes in children was generally caused by a

genetic disorder—only about 5 percent of childhood cases were

obesity-related, or Type 2, diabetes. Today, according

to the National Institutes of Health, Type 2 diabetes

accounts for at least 30 percent of all new childhood

cases of diabetes in this country.

Not surprisingly, money spent to treat diabetes has skyrock-

eted, too. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

estimate that diabetes accounted for $2.6 billion in health care

costs in 1969. Today’s number is an unbelievable $100 billion

a year.

Shouldn’t we know better than to eat two meals a day in

fast-food restaurants? That’s one argument. But where, exactly,

are consumers—particularly teenagers—supposed to find

alternatives? Drive down any thoroughfare in America, and I

guarantee you’ll see one of our country’s more than 13,000

McDonald’s restaurants. Now, drive back up the block and try

to find someplace to buy a grapefruit.

Complicating the lack of alternatives is the lack of informa-

tion about what, exactly, we’re consuming. There are no calorie

information charts on fast-food packaging, the way there are

on grocery items. Advertisements don’t carry warning labels

the way tobacco ads do. Prepared foods aren’t covered under

Food and Drug Administration labeling laws. Some fast-food

purveyors will provide calorie information on request, but even

that can be hard to understand.

For example, one company’s Web site lists its chicken salad

as containing 150 calories; the almonds and noodles that come

For tips on

saying why it

matters, see

Chapter 7.

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Don’t Blame the Eater

243

with it (an additional 190 calories) are listed separately. Add

a serving of the 280-calorie dressing, and you’ve got a healthy

lunch alternative that comes in at 620 calories. But that’s not

all. Read the small print on the back of the dressing packet and

you’ll realize it actually contains 2.5 servings. If you pour what

you’ve been served, you’re suddenly up around 1,040 calories,

which is half of the government’s recommended daily calorie

intake. And that doesn’t take into account that 450-calorie

super-size Coke.

Make fun if you will of these kids launching lawsuits against

the fast-food industry, but don’t be surprised if you’re the next

plaintiff. As with the tobacco industry, it may be only a matter of

time before state governments begin to see a direct line between

the $1 billion that McDonald’s and Burger King spend each year

on advertising and their own swelling health care costs.

And I’d say the industry is vulnerable. Fast-food compa-

nies are marketing to children a product with proven health

hazards and no warning labels. They would do well to protect

themselves, and their customers, by providing the nutrition

information people need to make informed choices about their

products. Without such warnings, we’ll see more sick, obese

children and more angry, litigious parents. I say, let the deep-

fried chips fall where they may.

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244

Hidden Intellectualism

GERALD GRAFF

Everyone knows some young person who is impressively

“street smart” but does poorly in school. What a waste, we

think, that one who is so intelligent about so many things in

life seems unable to apply that intelligence to academic work.

What doesn’t occur to us, though, is that schools and colleges

might be at fault for missing the opportunity to tap into such

street smarts and channel them into good academic work.

Nor do we consider one of the major reasons why schools

and colleges overlook the intellectual potential of street

smarts: the fact that we associate those street smarts with anti-

intellectual concerns. We associate the educated life, the life of

the mind, too narrowly and exclusively with subjects and texts

that we consider inherently weighty and academic. We assume

Gerald Graff, the co-author of this book, is a professor of English

and education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is a past

president of the Modern Language Association, the world’s largest

professional association of university scholars and teachers. This essay

is adapted from his 2003 book Clueless in Aca deme: How Schooling

Obscures the Life of the Mind.

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Hidden Intellectualism

245

that it’s possible to wax intellectual about Plato, Shakespeare,

the French Revolution, and nuclear fission, but not about cars,

dating, fashion, sports, TV, or video games.

The trouble with this assumption is that no neces-

sary connection has ever been established between any

text or subject and the educational depth and weight

of the discussion it can generate. Real intellectuals turn any

subject, however lightweight it may seem, into grist for their

mill through the thoughtful questions they bring to it, whereas

a dullard will find a way to drain the interest out of the richest

subject. That’s why a George Orwell writing on the cultural

meanings of penny postcards is infinitely more substantial than

the cogitations of many professors on Shakespeare or globaliza-

tion (104–16).

Students do need to read models of intellectually challeng-

ing writing—and Orwell is a great one—if they are to become

intellectuals themselves. But they would be more prone to

take on intellectual identities if we encouraged them to do

so at first on subjects that interest them rather than ones that

interest us.

I offer my own adolescent experience as a case in point.

Until I entered college, I hated books and cared only for sports.

The only reading I cared to do or could do was sports maga-

zines, on which I became hooked, becoming a regular reader of

Sport magazine in the late forties, Sports Illustrated when it began

publishing in 1954, and the annual magazine guides to profes-

sional baseball, football, and basketball. I also loved the sports

novels for boys of John R. Tunis and Clair Bee and autobiog-

raphies of sports stars like Joe DiMaggio’s Lucky to Be a Yankee

and Bob Feller’s Strikeout Story. In short, I was your typical

teenage anti-intellectual—or so I believed for a long time. I

have recently come to think, however, that my preference for

See pp. 58–61

for tips on

disagreeing,

with reasons.

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GERALD GRAFF

246

sports over schoolwork was not anti-intellectualism so much as

intellectualism by other means.

In the Chicago neighborhood I grew up in, which had

become a melting pot after World War II, our block was solidly

middle class, but just a block away—doubtless concentrated

there by the real estate companies—were African Americans,

Native Americans, and “hillbilly” whites who had recently fled

postwar joblessness in the South and Appalachia. Negotiating

this class boundary was a tricky matter. On the one hand, it

was necessary to maintain the boundary between “clean-cut”

boys like me and working-class “hoods,” as we called them,

which meant that it was good to be openly smart in a book-

ish sort of way. On the other hand, I was desperate for the

approval of the hoods, whom I encountered daily on the play-

ing field and in the neighborhood, and for this purpose it was

not at all good to be book-smart. The hoods would turn on

you if they sensed you were putting on airs over them: “Who

you lookin’ at, smart ass?” as a leather-jacketed youth once

said to me as he relieved me of my pocket change along with

my self-respect.

I grew up torn, then, between the need to prove I was

smart and the fear of a beating if I proved it too well; between

the need not to jeopardize my respectable future and the

need to impress the hoods. As I lived it, the conflict came

down to a choice between being physically tough and being

verbal. For a boy in my neighborhood and elementary school,

only being “tough” earned you complete legitimacy. I still

recall endless, complicated debates in this period with my

closest pals over who was “the toughest guy in the school.”

If you were less than negligible as a fighter, as I was, you

settled for the next best thing, which was to be inarticulate,

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Hidden Intellectualism

247

carefully hiding telltale marks of literacy like correct grammar

and pronunciation.

In one way, then, it would be hard to imagine an adolescence

more thoroughly anti-intellectual than mine. Yet in retrospect,

I see that it’s more complicated, that I and the 1950s themselves

were not simply hostile toward intellectualism, but divided and

ambivalent. When Marilyn Monroe married the playwright

Arthur Miller in 1956 after divorcing the retired baseball star

Joe DiMaggio, the symbolic triumph of geek over jock suggested

the way the wind was blowing. Even Elvis, according to his

biographer Peter Guralnick, turns out to have supported Adlai

over Ike in the presidential election of 1956. “I don’t dig the

intellectual bit,” he told reporters. “But I’m telling you, man,

he knows the most” (327).

Though I too thought I did not “dig the intellectual bit,”

I see now that I was unwittingly in training for it. The germs

had actually been planted in the seemingly philistine debates

about which boys were the toughest. I see now that in the

interminable analysis of sports teams, movies, and toughness

that my friends and I engaged in—a type of analysis, needless

to say, that the real toughs would never have stooped to—I

was already betraying an allegiance to the egghead world. I was

practicing being an intellectual before I knew that was what

I wanted to be.

It was in these discussions with friends about toughness and

sports, I think, and in my reading of sports books and maga-

zines, that I began to learn the rudiments of the intellectual

life: how to make an argument, weigh different kinds of evi-

dence, move between particulars and generalizations, summa-

rize the views of others, and enter a conversation about ideas.

It was in reading and arguing about sports and toughness that

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GERALD GRAFF

248

I experienced what it felt like to propose a generalization,

restate and respond to a counterargument, and perform other

intellectualizing operations, including composing the kind of

sentences I am writing now.

Only much later did it dawn on me that the sports world

was more compelling than school because it was more intellec-

tual than school, not less. Sports after all was full of challeng-

ing arguments, debates, problems for analysis, and intricate

statistics that you could care about, as school conspicuously

was not. I believe that street smarts beat out book smarts in

our culture not because street smarts are nonintellectual, as

we generally suppose, but because they satisfy an intellectual

thirst more thoroughly than school culture, which seems pale

and unreal.

They also satisfy the thirst for community. When you

entered sports debates, you became part of a community that

was not limited to your family and friends, but was national

and public. Whereas schoolwork isolated you from others, the

pennant race or Ted Williams’s .400 batting average was some-

thing you could talk about with people you had never met.

Sports introduced you not only to a culture steeped in argu-

ment, but to a public argument culture that transcended the

personal. I can’t blame my schools for failing to make intel-

lectual culture resemble the Super Bowl, but I do fault them

for failing to learn anything from the sports and entertainment

worlds about how to organize and represent intellectual culture,

how to exploit its gamelike element and turn it into arresting

public spectacle that might have competed more successfully

for my youthful attention.

For here is another thing that never dawned on me and is

still kept hidden from students, with tragic results: that the

real intellectual world, the one that existed in the big world

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Hidden Intellectualism

249

beyond school, is organized very much like the world of team

sports, with rival texts, rival interpretations and evaluations

of texts, rival theories of why they should be read and taught,

and elaborate team competitions in which “fans” of writers,

intellectual systems, methodologies, and -isms contend against

each other.

To be sure, school contained plenty of competition, which

became more invidious as one moved up the ladder (and has

become even more so today with the advent of high-stakes test-

ing). In this competition, points were scored not by making

arguments, but by a show of information or vast reading, by

grade-grubbing, or other forms of one-upmanship. School com-

petition, in short, reproduced the less attractive features of sports

culture without those that create close bonds and community.

And in distancing themselves from anything as enjoyable

and absorbing as sports, my schools missed the opportunity to

capitalize on an element of drama and conflict that the intel-

lectual world shares with sports. Consequently, I failed to see

the parallels between the sports and academic worlds that could

have helped me cross more readily from one argument culture

to the other.

Sports is only one of the domains whose potential for lit-

eracy training (and not only for males) is seriously under-

estimated by educators, who see sports as competing with

academic development rather than a route to it. But if this

argument suggests why it is a good idea to assign readings

and topics that are close to students’ existing interests, it also

suggests the limits of this tactic. For students who get excited

about the chance to write about their passion for cars will

often write as poorly and unreflectively on that topic as on

Shakespeare or Plato. Here is the flip side of what I pointed

out before: that there’s no necessary relation between the

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GERALD GRAFF

250

degree of interest a student shows in a text or subject and

the quality of thought or expression such a student manifests

in writing or talking about it. The challenge, as college pro-

fessor Ned Laff has put it, “is not simply to exploit students’

nonacademic interests, but to get them to see those interests

through academic eyes.”

To say that students need to see their interests “through

academic eyes” is to say that street smarts are not enough. Mak-

ing students’ nonacademic interests an object of academic study

is useful, then, for getting students’ attention and overcoming

their boredom and alienation, but this tactic won’t in itself

necessarily move them closer to an academically rigorous treat-

ment of those interests. On the other hand, inviting students to

write about cars, sports, or clothing fashions does not have to

be a pedagogical cop-out as long as students are required to see

these interests “through academic eyes,” that is, to think and

write about cars, sports, and fashions in a reflective, analytical

way, one that sees them as microcosms of what is going on in

the wider culture.

If I am right, then schools and colleges are missing an

opportunity when they do not encourage students to take their

nonacademic interests as objects of academic study. It is self-

defeating to decline to introduce any text or subject that figures

to engage students who will otherwise tune out academic work

entirely. If a student cannot get interested in Mill’s On Liberty

but will read Sports Illustrated or Vogue or the hip-hop magazine

Source with absorption, this is a strong argument for assigning

the magazines over the classic. It’s a good bet that if students get

hooked on reading and writing by doing term papers on Source,

they will eventually get to On Liberty. But even if they don’t,

the magazine reading will make them more literate and reflec-

tive than they would be otherwise. So it makes pedagogical

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Hidden Intellectualism

251

sense to develop classroom units on sports, cars, fashions, rap

music, and other such topics. Give me the student anytime who

writes a sharply argued, sociologically acute analysis of an issue

in Source over the student who writes a lifeless explication of

Hamlet or Socrates’ Apology.

Works Cited

Cramer, Richard Ben. Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life. New York: Simon, 2000.

Print.

DiMaggio, Joe. Lucky to Be a Yankee. New York: Bantam, 1949. Print.

Feller, Bob. Strikeout Story, New York: Bantam, 1948. Print.

Guralnick, Peter. Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley. Boston:

Little, Brown, 1994. Print.

Orwell, George. A Collection of Essays. New York: Harcourt, 1953. Print.

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252

Nuclear Waste

RICHARD A. MULLER

As people recognize the dangers of fossil fuel plants—

especially the risk of global warming from carbon dioxide

production—nuclear power begins to look more attractive.

But what about the waste—all that highly radioactive debris

that will endure for thousands of years? Do we have the right

to leave such a legacy to our children?

Nuclear waste is one of the biggest technical issues that any

future president is likely to face. The problem seems totally

intractable. Plutonium—just one of the many highly radioac-

tive waste products—has a half-life of 24,000 years. Even in

that unimaginable amount of time, its intense radioactivity will

decrease by only half. After 48,000 years it will still emit deadly

radiation at a quarter of its original level. Even after 100,000

years the radiation will still be above 10% of the level it had

when it left the reactor. What if it leaks into the ground and

Richard A. Muller is professor of physics at the University of

California at Berkeley. He is a past winner of the MacArthur “genius”

Fellowship. This piece was given originally as a lecture in his physics

course for non-science students and was then published in a collection

of his course lectures, Physics for Future Presidents (2008).

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253

Nuclear Waste

reaches human water supplies? How can we possibly certify that

this material can be kept safe for 100,000 years?

Still, the US government persists in its pursuit of “safe”

nuclear waste disposal. It has created a prototype nuclear

waste facility buried deep within Yucca Mountain, Nevada

as shown in the figure below . To keep the waste safe, the stor-

age rooms are 1000 feet below the surface. To store even part

of the present nuclear waste requires a vast area, nearly 2 square

miles. The cost of the facility is expected to reach $100 billion,

with hundreds of billions of dollars more in operating costs.

To make matters worse, the Yucca Mountain region is seis-

mically active. More than 600 earthquakes of magnitude 2.5

and higher have occurred within 50 miles in the last decade

Yucca Mountain, the site of the prototype nuclear waste storage

facility.

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254

RICHARD A. MULLER

alone. Moreover, the region was created by volcanic activity.

Although that was millions of years ago, how sure can we be

that the waste facility won’t be torn apart by another eruption?

Many alternatives have been suggested for nuclear waste

storage. Why not just send the waste into the sun? Well, maybe

that’s not such a good idea, since on launch some rockets do

crash back down on the Earth. Some scientists have proposed

that the waste be put in vessels and sunk under the oceans, in

a region where the movement of the Earth’s crustal plates will

subduct the material, eventually burying it hundreds of miles

deep. Yet just the fact that scientists make such suggestions

seems to emphasize how severe the problem really is.

Here is the worst part. We have already generated more than

enough nuclear waste to fill up Yucca Mountain. That waste

won’t go away. Yet you, a future president, are considering more

nuclear power? Are you insane?

My Confession

The furor against nuclear power has been so intense that I felt

compelled to reproduce the anti-nuke viewpoint in the opening of

this chapter, including at least part of their passion. These are the

arguments that you will hear when you are president. Yet it hardly

matters whether you are pro-nuke or anti-nuke. The waste is there,

and you will have to do something with it. You can’t ignore this

issue, and to do the right thing (and to convince the public that

you’re doing the right thing) you must understand the physics.

When I work out the numbers, I find the dangers of stor-

ing our waste at Yucca Mountain to be small compared to the

dangers of not doing so, and significantly smaller than many

other dangers we ignore. Yet the contentious debate continues.

More research is demanded, but every bit of additional research

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seems to raise new questions that exacerbate the public’s fear

and distrust. I have titled this section “My Confession” because

I find it hard to stand aside and present the physics without

giving my own personal evaluation. Through most of this book

I’ve tried to present the facts, and just the facts, and let you

draw the conclusions. In this section, I confess that I’ll depart

from that approach. I can’t be evenhanded, because the facts

seem to point strongly toward a particular conclusion.

I’ve discussed Yucca Mountain with scientists, politicians, and

many concerned citizens. Most of the politicians believe the mat-

ter to be a scientific issue, and most of the scientists think it is

political. Both are in favor of more research—scientists because

that is what they do, and politicians because they think the

research will answer the key questions. I don’t think it will.

Here are some pertinent facts. The underground tunnels at

Yucca Mountain are designed to hold 77,000 tons of

high-level nuclear waste. Initially, the most dangerous

part of this waste is not plutonium, but fission frag-

ments such as strontium-90, an unstable nucleus created

when the uranium nucleus splits. Because these fission

fragments have shorter half-lives than uranium, the waste is

about 1000 times more radioactive than the original ore. It takes

10,000 years for the waste (not including plutonium, which

is also produced in the reactor, and which I’ll discuss later)

to decay back to the radioactive level of the mined uranium.

Largely on the basis of this number, people have searched for a

site that will remain secure for 10,000 years. After that, we are

better off than if we left the uranium in the ground, so 10,000

years of safety is probably good enough, not the 100,000 years

that I mentioned in the chapter introduction.

Ten thousand years still seems impossibly long. What will

the world be like 10,000 years from now? Think backward to

Chapter 16

has tips on

describing

the data

underpinning

a scientific

argument.

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RICHARD A. MULLER

appreciate the amount of time involved: Ten thousand years

ago humans had just discovered agriculture. Writing wouldn’t

be invented for another 5000 years. Can we really plan 10,000

years into the future? Of course we can’t. We have no idea what

the world will be like then. There is no way we can claim that

we will be able to store nuclear waste for 10,000 years. Any

plan to do that is clearly unacceptable.

Of course, calling storage unacceptable is itself an unac-

ceptable answer. We have the waste, and we have to do

something with it. But the problem isn’t really as hard as I

just portrayed it. We don’t need absolute security for 10,000

years. A more reasonable goal is to reduce the risk of leak-

age to 0.1%—that is, to one chance in a thousand. Because

the radioactivity is only 1000 times worse than that of the

uranium we removed from the ground, the net risk (prob-

ability multiplied by danger) is 1000  0.001  1—that is,

basically the same as the risk if we hadn’t mined the uranium

in the first place. (I am assuming the linear hypothesis—

that total cancer risk is independent of individual doses or

dose rate—but my argument won’t depend strongly on its

validity.)

Moreover, we don’t need this 0.1% level of security for the

full 10,000 years. After 300 years, the fission fragment radio-

activity will have decreased by a factor of 10; it will be only

100 times as great as the mined uranium. So by then, we no

longer need the risk to be at the 0.1% level, but could allow a

1% chance that all of the waste leaks out. That’s a lot easier than

guaranteeing absolute containment for 10,000 years. Moreover,

this calculation assumes that 100% of the waste escapes. For

leakage of 1% of the waste, we can accept a 100% probability

after 300 years. When you think about it this way, the storage

problem begins to seem tractable.

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However, the public discussion doesn’t take into account

these numbers, or the fact that the initial mining actually

removed radioactivity from the ground. Instead, the public

insists on absolute security. The Department of Energy contin-

ues to search Yucca Mountain for unknown earthquake faults,

and many people assume that the acceptability of the facility

depends on the absence of any such faults. They believe that the

discovery of a new fault will rule Yucca Mountain out. The issue,

though, should not be whether there will be any earthquakes in

the next 10,000 years, but whether after 300 years there will be

a 1% chance of a sufficiently large earthquake that 100% of the

waste will escape its glass capsules and reach groundwater. Or,

we could accept a 100% chance that 1% of the waste will leak,

or a 10% chance that 10% will leak. Any of these options leads

to a lower risk than if the original uranium had been left in

the ground, mixing its natural radioactivity with groundwater.

Absolute security is an unnecessarily extreme goal, since even

the original uranium in the ground didn’t provide it.

The problem is even easier to solve when we ask why we

are comparing the danger of waste storage only to the danger

of the uranium originally mined. Why not compare it to the

larger danger of the natural uranium left in the soil? Colorado,

where much of the uranium is obtained, is a geologically active

region, full of faults and fissures and mountains rising out of

the prairie, and its surface rock contains about a billion tons

of uranium. The radioactivity in this uranium is 20 times

greater than the legal limit for Yucca Mountain, and it will

take more than 13 billion years—not just a few hundred—for

the radioactivity to drop by a factor of 10. Yet water that runs

through, around, and over this radioactive rock is the source

of the Colorado River, which is used for drinking water in

much of the West, including Los Angeles and San Diego.

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RICHARD A. MULLER

And unlike the glass pellets that store the waste in Yucca

Mountain, most of the uranium in the Colorado ground is

water-soluble. Here is the absurd-sounding conclusion: if the

Yucca Mountain facility were at full capacity and all the waste

leaked out of its glass containment immediately and managed

to reach groundwater, the danger would still be 20 times less

than that currently posed by natural uranium leaching into

the Colorado River. The situation brings to mind the resident

near Three Mile Island who feared the tiny leakage from the

reactor but not the much greater radioactivity of natural radon

gas seeping up from the ground.

I don’t mean to imply that waste from Yucca Mountain is

not dangerous. Nor am I suggesting that we should panic about

radioactivity in the Los Angeles water supply. The Colorado

River example illustrates only that when we worry about mys-

terious and unfamiliar dangers, we sometimes lose perspective.

Every way I do the calculation, I reach the same conclusion:

waste leakage from Yucca Mountain is not a great danger. Put

the waste in glass pellets in a reasonably stable geologic forma-

tion, and start worrying about real threats—such as the dangers

of the continued burning of fossil fuels.

A related issue is the risk of mishaps and attacks during the

transportation of nuclear waste to the Yucca Mountain site. The

present plans call for the waste to be carried in thick, reinforced

concrete cylinders that can survive high-speed crashes without

leaking. In fact, it would be very hard for a terrorist to open

the containers, or to use the waste in radiological weapons.

The smart terrorist is more likely to hijack a tanker truck full

of gasoline, chlorine, or another common toxic material and

then blow it up in a city. Recall from the chapter on terrorist

nukes that al-Qaeda told José Padilla to abandon his effort to

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259

Nuclear Waste

make a dirty bomb and instead focus his efforts on natural-gas

explosions in apartment buildings.

Why are we worrying about transporting nuclear

waste? Ironically, we have gone to such lengths to ensure

the safety of the transport that the public thinks the

danger is greater than it really is. Images on evening newscasts

of concrete containers being dropped from five-story buildings,

smashing into the ground and bouncing undamaged, do not

reassure the public. This is a consequence of the “where there’s

smoke there’s fire” paradox of public safety. Raise the standards,

increase the safety, do more research, study the problem in

greater depth, and in the process you will improve safety and

frighten the public. After all, would scientists work so hard if

the threat weren’t real? Scientists who propose rocketing the

waste to the sun, or burying it in a subduction zone in the ocean,

also seem to be suggesting that the problem is truly intractable,

and that premise exacerbates the public fear.

See Chapter 7

for tips on

saying why it

matters.

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260

The (Futile) Pursuit

of the American Dream

BARBARA EHRENREICH

Because i’ve written a lot about poverty, I’m used

to hearing from people in scary circumstances. An eviction

notice has ar rived. A child has been diagnosed with a serious

illness and the health insurance has run out. The car has broken

down and there’s no way to get to work. These are the routine

emergen cies that plague the chronically poor. But it struck me,

starting in about 2002, that many such tales of hardship were

coming from people who were once members in good standing

of the middle class—college graduates and former occupants

of mid-level white-collar positions. One such writer upbraided

me for what she saw as my neglect of hardworking, virtuous

people like herself.

Barbara Ehrenreich is an investigative journalist whose articles

have appeared in Harper’s, The Nation, the New York Times, and many

other periodicals. She’s the author of a number of books on various top-

ics, including Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

(2005), from which the piece here was taken. Her most recent book

is Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America (2009).

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The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

261

Try investigating people like me who didn’t have babies in high

school, who made good grades, who work hard and don’t kiss a lot

of ass and instead of getting promoted or paid fairly must regress to

working for $7/hr., having their student loans in perpetual defer-

ment, living at home with their par ents, and generally exist in debt

which they feel they may never get out of.

Stories of white-collar downward mobility cannot be brushed

off as easily as accounts of blue-collar economic woes, which the

hard-hearted traditionally blame on “bad choices”: failing to get

a college degree, for example, failing to postpone child-bearing

until acquiring a nest egg, or failing to choose affluent parents

in the first place. But distressed white-collar people cannot be

accused of fecklessness of any kind; they are the ones who “did

everything right.” They earned higher degrees, often setting

aside their youthful passion for philosophy or music to suffer

through dull practical majors like management or finance. In

some cases, they were high achievers who ran into trouble pre-

cisely because they had risen far enough in the company for their

salaries to look like a tempting cost cut. They were the losers,

in other words, in a classic game of bait and switch. And while

blue-collar poverty has become numbingly routine, white-collar

unemployment—and the poverty that often results—remains a

rude finger in the face of the American dream.

I realized that I knew very little about the mid- to upper lev-

els of the corporate world, having so far encountered this world

almost entirely through its low-wage, entry-level representa tives.

I was one of them—a server in a national chain restau rant, a

cleaning person, and a Wal-Mart “associate”—in the course of

researching an earlier book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting

By in America. Like everyone else, I’ve also en countered the cor-

porate world as a consumer, dealing with people quite far down

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BARBARA EHRENREICH

262

in the occupational hierarchy—retail clerks, customer service

representatives, telemarketers. Of the levels where decisions are

made—where the vice presidents, account executives, and regional

managers dwell—my experience has been limited to seeing these

sorts of people on airplanes, where they study books on “leader-

ship,” fiddle with spreadsheets on their laptops, or fall asleep over

biographies of the founding fathers.1 I’m better acquainted with

the corporate functionaries of the future, many of whom I’ve met

on my visits to college campuses, where “business” remains the

most popular major, if only because it is believed to be the safest

and most lucrative (National Center for Education Statistics).

But there have been growing signs of trouble—if not out-

right misery—within the white-collar corporate workforce.

First, starting with the economic downturn of 2001, there has

been a rise in unemployment among highly credentialed and

experienced people. In late 2003, when I started this project,

unemployment was running at about 5.9 percent, but in con-

trast to earlier economic downturns, a sizable portion—almost

20 percent, or about 1.6 million—of the unemployed were

white-collar professionals.2 Previous downturns had dispropor-

tionately hit blue-collar people; this time it was the relative

elite of professional, technical, and managerial employees who

were being singled out for media sympathy. In April 2003,

for example, the New York Times Magazine offered a much-

discussed cover story about a former $300,000-a-year computer

industry executive reduced, after two years of unemployment, to

working as a sales associate at the Gap (Mahler). Throughout

the first four years of the 2000s, there were similar stories of the

mighty or the mere midlevel brought low, ejected from their

office suites and forced to serve behind the counter at Starbucks.

Today, white-collar job insecurity is no longer a function of

the business cycle—rising as the stock market falls and declining

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The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

263

again when the numbers improve.3 Nor is it confined to a few

volatile sectors like telecommunications or technology, or a few

regions of the country like the rust belt or Silicon Valley. The

economy may be looking up, the company may be raking in

cash, and still the layoffs continue, like a perverse form of natu-

ral selection, weeding out the talented and successful as well as

the mediocre. Since the midnineties, this perpetual win nowing

process has been institutionalized under various eu phemisms

such as “downsizing,’’ “right-sizing,” “smart-sizing,” “restructur-

ing,” and “de-layering”—to which we can now add the outsourc-

ing of white-collar functions to cheaper labor markets overseas.

In the metaphor of the best-selling business book of the

first few years of the twenty-first century, the “cheese”—mean-

ing a stable, rewarding, job—has indeed been moved. A 2004

survey of executives found 95 percent expecting to move on,

voluntarily or otherwise, from their current jobs, and 68 percent

concerned about unexpected firings and layoffs (Mackay 94).

You don’t, in other words, have to lose a job to feel the anxiety

and despair of the unemployed.

A second sign of trouble could be called “overemploy ment.”

I knew, from my reading, that mid- and high-level cor porate

executives and professionals today often face the same punish-

ing demands on their time as low-paid wage earners who must

work two jobs in order to make ends meet. Econo mist Juliet

Schor, who wrote The Overworked American, and business jour-

nalist Jill Andresky Fraser, author of White Collar Sweatshop,

describe stressed-out white-collar employees who put in ten-

to twelve-hour-long days at the office, continue to work on

their laptops in the evening at home, and remain teth ered to

the office by cell phone even on vacations and holidays. “On

Wall Street, for example,” Fraser reports, “it is common for a

supervisor to instruct new hires to keep a spare set of clothes

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BARBARA EHRENREICH

264

and toothbrush in the office for all those late night episodes

when it just won’t make sense to head home for a quick snooze

(Fraser 23). She quotes an Intel employee:

If you make the choice to have a home life, you will be ranked and

rated at the bottom. I was willing to work the endless hours, come

in on weekends, travel to the ends of the earth. I had no hobbies,

no outside interests. If I wasn’t involved with the company, I wasn’t

anything (qtd. in Fraser 158).

Something, evidently, is going seriously wrong within a

so cioeconomic group I had indeed neglected as too comfortable

and too powerful to merit my concern. Where I had imagined

comfort, there is now growing distress, and I determined to

in vestigate. I chose the same strategy I had employed in Nickel

and Dimed: to enter this new world myself, as an undercover

reporter, and see what I could learn about the problems first-

hand. Were people being driven out of their corporate jobs?

What did it take to find a new one? And, if things were as bad

as some reports suggested, why was there so little protest?

The plan was straightforward enough: to find a job, a

“good” job, which I defined minimally as a white-collar posi-

tion that would provide health insurance and an income of

about $50,000 a year, enough to land me solidly in the middle

class. The job itself would give me a rare firsthand glimpse into

the midlevel corporate world, and the effort to find it would

of course place me among the most hard-pressed white-collar

corporate workers—the ones who don’t have jobs.

Since I wanted to do this as anonymously as possible, cer tain

areas of endeavor had to be excluded, such as higher edu cation,

publishing (magazines, newspapers, and books), and nonprofit

liberal organizations. In any of these, I would have run the

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The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

265

risk of being recognized and perhaps treated differently—more

favorably, one hopes—than the average job seeker. But these

restrictions did not significantly narrow the field, since of course

most white-collar professionals work in other sectors of the

for-profit, corporate world—from banking to business services,

pharmaceuticals to finance.

The decision to enter corporate life—and an unfamiliar sec tor

of it, at that—required that I abandon, or at least set aside, deeply

embedded attitudes and views, including my longstanding cri-

tique of American corporations and the people who lead them.

I had cut my teeth, as a fledgling investigative journalist in the

seventies, on the corporations that were com ing to dominate the

health-care system: pharmaceutical com panies, hospital chains,

insurance companies. Then, sometime in the eighties, I shifted

my attention to the treatment of blue-and pink-collar employees,

blaming America’s intractable level of poverty—12.5 percent

by the federal government’s official count, 25 percent by more

up-to-date measures—on the chronically low wages offered to

nonprofessional workers. In the last few years, I seized on the

wave of financial scandals— from Enron through, at the time

of this writing, HealthSouth and Hollingers International—as

evidence of growing corrup tion within the corporate world, a

pattern of internal looting without regard for employees, con-

sumers, or even, in some cases, stockholders.

But for the purposes of this project, these criticisms and

reservations had to be set aside or shoved as far back in my

mind as possible. Like it or not, the corporation is the domi nant

unit of the global economy and the form of enterprise that our

lives depend on in a day-to-day sense. I write this on an IBM

laptop while sipping Lipton tea and wearing clothes from the

Gap—all major firms or elements thereof. It’s corporations that

make the planes run (though not necessarily on time), bring

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BARBARA EHRENREICH

266

us (and increasingly grow) our food, and generally “make it

happen.” I’d been on the outside of the corporate world, often

complaining bitterly, and now I wanted in.

This would not, I knew, be an altogether fair test of the job

market, if only because I had some built-in disadvantages as a

job seeker. For one thing, I am well into middle age, and since

age discrimination is a recognized problem in the corporate

world even at the tender age of forty, I was certainly vulnerable

to it myself. This defect, however, is by no means unique to

me. Many people—from displaced homemakers to downsized

executives—now find themselves searching for jobs at an age

that was once associated with a restful retirement.

Furthermore, I had the disadvantage of never having held

a white-collar job with a corporation. My one profes-

sional-level office job, which lasted for about seven

months, was in the public sector, at the New York City

Bureau of the Budget. It had involved such typical white-collar

activities as attending meetings, digesting reports, and writ-

ing memos; but that was a long time ago, before cell phones,

PowerPoint, and e-mail. In the corporate world I now sought

to enter, everything would be new to me: the standards of per-

formance, the methods of evaluation, the lines and even the

modes of communication. But I’m a quick study, as you have

to be in journalism, and counted on this to get me by.

The first step was to acquire a new identity and personal

history to go with it, meaning, in this case, a résumé. It is easier

to change your identity than you might think. Go to Alavarado

and Seventh Street in Los Angeles, for example, and you will

be approached by men whispering, “ID, ID.” I, however, took

the legal route, because I wanted my documents to be entirely

in order when the job offers started coming in. My fear, perhaps

exaggerated, was that my current name might be recog nized, or

See Chapter 8

for tips on

connecting

the parts.

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The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

267

would at least turn up an embarrassing abundance of Google

entries. So in November 2003 I legally changed back to my

maiden name, Barbara Alexander, and acquired a Social Secu-

rity card to go with it.

As for the résumé: although it had to be faked, I wanted it

as much as possible to represent my actual skills, which, I firmly

believed, would enrich whatever company I went to work

for. I am a writer—author of thousands of published arti cles

and about twelve nonfiction books, counting the coauthored

ones—and I know that “writing” translates, in the corporate

world, into public relations or “communications” generally.

Many journalism schools teach PR too, which may be fitting,

since PR is really journalism’s evil twin. Whereas a journalist

seeks the truth, a PR person may be called upon to disguise it or

even to advance an untruth. If your employer, a pharmaceutical

company, claims its new drug cures both can cer and erectile

dysfunction, your job is to promote it, not to investigate the

grounds for these claims.

I could do this, on a temporary basis anyway, and have even

done many of the things PR people routinely do: I’ve writ-

ten press releases, pitched stories to editors and reporters, pre-

pared press packets, and helped arrange press conferences. As

an author, I have also worked closely with my publisher’s PR

people and have always found them to be intelligent and in

every way congenial.

I have also been an activist in a variety of causes over the

years, and this experience too must translate into something

valuable to any firm willing to hire me. I have planned meet ings

and chaired them; I have worked in dozens of diverse groups and

often played a leadership role in them; I am at ease as a public

speaker, whether giving a lengthy speech or a brief presentation

on a panel—all of which amounts to the “leader ship” skills that

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BARBARA EHRENREICH

268

should be an asset to any company. At the very least, I could

claim to be an “event planner,” capable of dividing gatherings

into plenaries and break-out sessions, arranging the press cover-

age, and planning the follow-up events.

Even as a rough draft, the résumé took days of preparation.

I had to line up people willing to lie for me, should they be

called by a potential employer, and attest to the fine work I

had done for them. Fortunately, I have friends who were will-

ing to do this, some of them located at recognizable companies.

Although I did not dare claim actual employment at these

firms, since a call to their Human Resources departments would

im mediately expose the lie, I felt I could safely pretend to have

“consulted” to them over the years. Suffice it to say that I gave

Barbara Alexander an exemplary history in public relations,

sometimes with a little event planning thrown in, and that the

dissimulation involved in crafting my new résumé was further

preparation for any morally challenging projects I should be

called upon to undertake as a PR person.

I did not, however, embellish my new identity with an affect

or mannerisms different from my own. I am not an actor and

would not have been able to do this even if I had wanted to.

“Barbara Alexander” was only a cover for Barbara Ehrenreich;

her behavior would, for better or worse, always be my own. In

fact, in a practical sense I was simply changing my occupa-

tional status from “self-employed/writer” to “unemployed”— a

distinction that might be imperceptible to the casual observer.

I would still stay home most days at my computer, only now,

instead of researching and writing articles, I would be research-

ing and contacting companies that might employ me. The new

name and fake résumé were only my ticket into the ranks of

the unemployed white-collar Americans who spend their days

searching for a decent-paying job.

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The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

269

The project required some minimal structure; since I was

stepping into the unknown, I needed to devise some guide lines

for myself. My first rule was that I would do everything possible

to land a job, which meant being open to every form of help

that presented itself: utilizing whatever books, web sites, and

businesses, for example, that I could find offering guidance to

job seekers. I would endeavor to behave as I was expected to,

insofar as I could decipher the expectations. I did not know

exactly what forms of effort would be required of successful job

seekers, only that I would, as humbly and dili gently as possible,

give it my best try.

Second, I would be prepared to go anywhere for a job or even

an interview, and would advertise this geographic flexibil ity in

my contacts with potential employers. I was based in Charlot-

tesville, Virginia, throughout this project, but I was prepared

to travel anywhere in the United States to get a job and then

live there for several months if I found one. Nor would I shun

any industry—other than those where I might be recognized—

as unglamorous or morally repugnant. My third rule was that

I would have to take the first job I was offered that met my

requirements as to income and benefits.

I knew that the project would take a considerable invest-

ment of time and money, so I set aside ten months4 and the

sum of $5,000 for travel and other expenses that might arise in

the course of job searching. My expectation was that I would

make the money back once I got a job and probably come out

far ahead. As for the time, I budgeted roughly four to six months

for the search—five months being the average for unemployed

people in 2004—and another three to four months of employ-

ment (Leland). I would have plenty of time both to sample the

life of the white-collar unemployed and to explore the corpo-

rate world they sought to reenter.

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BARBARA EHRENREICH

270

From the outset, I pictured this abstraction, the corporate

world, as a castle on a hill—well fortified, surrounded by difficult

checkpoints, with its glass walls gleaming invitingly from on

high. I knew that it would be a long hard climb just to get to

the door. But I’ve made my way into remote and lofty places

before—college and graduate school, for example. I’m patient

and crafty; I have stamina and resolve; and I believed that I

could do this too.

In fact, the project, as I planned it, seemed less challenging

than I might have liked. As an undercover reporter, I would of

course be insulated from the real terrors of the white-collar work

world, if only because I was independent of it for my in come and

self-esteem. Most of my fellow job seekers would probably have

come to their status involuntarily, through lay offs or individual

firings. For them, to lose a job is to enter a world of pain. Their

income collapses to the size of an unem ployment insurance

check; their self-confidence plummets. Much has been written

about the psychological damage in curred by the unemployed—

their sudden susceptibility to de pression, divorce, substance

abuse, and even suicide.5 No such calamities could occur in

my life as an undercover job seeker and, later, jobholder. There

would be no sudden de scent into poverty, nor any real sting of

rejection.

I also started with the expectation that this project would

be far less demanding than the work I had undertaken for

Nickel and Dimed. Physically, it would be a piece of cake—no

scrubbing, no heavy lifting, no walking or running for hours

on end. As for behavior, I imagined that I would be immune

from the constant subservience and obedience demanded of

low-wage blue-collar workers, that I would be far freer to

be, and express, myself. As it turns out, I was wrong on all

counts.

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The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

271

Notes

1Even fiction—my favorite source of insight into culture and times remote

from my own—was no help. While the fifties and sixties had produced

absorbing novels about white-collar corporate life, including Richard Yates’s

Revolutionary Road and Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, more

recent novels and films tend to ignore the white-collar corporate work world

except as a backdrop to sexual intrigue.

2According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women are only slightly

more likely than men to be unemployed—6.1 percent compared to

5.7 percent—and white women, like myself, are about half as likely as black

women to be unemployed (www.bls.gov).

3I was particularly enlightened by Jill Andresky Fraser’s White Collar

Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and Its Rewards in Corporate America

(New York: Norton, 2001) and Richard Sennett’s The Corrosion of Character:

The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York: Norton,

1998).

4From December 2003 to October 2004, with the exception of most of

July, when I had a brief real-life job writing biweekly columns for the New

York Times.

5See, for example, Katherine S. Newman’s Falling from Grace: Downward

Mobility in the Age of Affluence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999)

or, for a highly readable first-person account, G.J. Meyer’s Executive Blues

(New York: Franklin Square Press, 1995).

Works Cited

Fraser, Jill Andresky. White Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and Its

Rewards in Corporate America. New York: Norton, 2001. Print.

Leland, John. “For Unemployed, Wait for New Work Grows Longer.” New

York Times 9 Jan. 2005. Print.

Mackay, Harvey. We Got Fired! And It’s the Best Thing That Ever Happened to

Us. New York: Ballantine, 2004. Print.

Mahler, Jonathan. “Commute to Nowhere.” New York Times Magazine 13

Apr. 2003. Print.

National Center for Education Statistics. Undergraduate Enrollments in Academic,

Career, and Vocational Education. Maryland: Issue Brief, 2004. PDF file.

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272

Everything That Rises Must Converge

FLANNERY O’CONNOR

Her doctor had told Julian’s mother that she must

lose twenty pounds on account of her blood pressure, so on

Wednesday nights Julian had to take her downtown on the bus

for a reducing class at the Y. The reducing class was designed for

working girls over fifty, who weighed from 165 to 200 pounds.

His mother was one of the slimmer ones, but she said ladies

did not tell their age or weight. She would not ride the buses

by herself at night since they had been integrated, and because

the reducing class was one of her few pleasures, necessary for

her health, and free, she said Julian could at least put himself

out to take her, considering all she did for him. Julian did not

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) was an American writer and

essayist. Born in Savannah, Georgia, she authored two novels and over

thirty short stories. “Everything That Rises Must Converge” comes

from her second short story collection, published posthumously in

1965. Her style is frequently associated with the Southern Gothic, a

genre of stories set in the American South in which characters often

find themselves in ominous situations.

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Everything That Rises Must Converge

like to consider all she did for him, but every Wednesday night

he braced himself and took her.

She was almost ready to go, standing before the hall mirror,

putting on her hat, while he, his hands behind him, appeared

pinned to the door frame, waiting like Saint Sebastian for the

arrows to begin piercing him. The hat was new and had cost her

seven dollars and a half. She kept saying, “Maybe I shouldn’t

have paid that for it. No, I shouldn’t have. I’ll take it off and

return it tomorrow. I shouldn’t have bought it.”

Julian raised his eyes to heaven. “Yes, you should have

bought it,” he said. “Put it on and let’s go.” It was a hideous

hat. A purple velvet flap came down on one side of it and

stood up on the other; the rest of it was green and looked like

a cushion with the stuffing out. He decided it was less comical

than jaunty and pathetic. Everything that gave her pleasure

was small and depressed him.

She lifted the hat one more time and set it down slowly on

top of her head. Two wings of gray hair protruded on either

side of her florid face, but her eyes, sky-blue, were as innocent

and untouched by experience as they must have been when she

was ten. Were it not that she was a widow who had struggled

fiercely to feed and clothe and put him through school and who

was supporting him still, “until he got on his feet,” she might

have been a little girl that he had to take to town.

“It’s all right, it’s all right,” he said. “Let’s go.” He opened the

door himself and started down the walk to get her going. The

sky was a dying violet and the houses stood out darkly against

it, bulbous liver-colored monstrosities of a uniform ugliness

though no two were alike. Since this had been a fashionable

neighborhood forty years ago, his mother persisted in thinking

they did well to have an apartment in it. Each house had a nar-

row collar of dirt around it in which sat, usually, a grubby child.

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274

FLANNERY O’CONNOR

Julian walked with his hands in his pockets, his head down and

thrust forward and his eyes glazed with the determination to

make himself completely numb during the time he would be

sacrificed to her pleasure.

The door closed and he turned to find the dumpy figure,

surmounted by the atrocious hat, coming toward him. “Well,”

she said, “you only live once and paying a little more for it, I

at least won’t meet myself coming and going.”

“Some day I’ll start making money,” Julian said gloomily—

he knew he never would—“and you can have one of those

jokes whenever you take the fit.” But first they would move.

He visualized a place where the nearest neighbors would be

three miles away on either side.

“I think you’re doing fine,” she said, drawing on her gloves.

“You’ve only been out of school a year. Rome wasn’t built in

a day.”

She was one of the few members of the Y reducing class who

arrived in hat and gloves and who had a son who had been

to college. “It takes time,” she said, “and the world is in such

a mess. This hat looked better on me than any of the others,

though when she brought it out I said, ‘Take that thing back.

I wouldn’t have it on my head,’ and she said, ‘Now wait till

you see it on,’ and when she put it on me, I said, ‘We-ull,’ and

she said, ‘If you ask me, that hat does something for you and

you do something for the hat, and besides,’ she said, ‘with that

hat, you won’t meet yourself coming and going.’”

Julian thought he could have stood his lot better if she had

been selfish, if she had been an old hag who drank and screamed

at him. He walked along, saturated in depression, as if in the

midst of his martyrdom he had lost his faith. Catching sight of

his long, hopeless, irritated face, she stopped suddenly with a

grief-stricken look, and pulled back on his arm. “Wait on me,”

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Everything That Rises Must Converge

she said. “I’m going back to the house and take this thing off

and tomorrow I’m going to return it. I was out of my head.

I can pay the gas bill with that seven-fifty.”

He caught her arm in a vicious grip. “You are not going to

take it back,” he said. “I like it.”

“Well,” she said, “I don’t think I ought . . .”

“Shut up and enjoy it,” he muttered, more depressed than

ever.

“With the world in the mess it’s in,” she said, “it’s a wonder

we can enjoy anything. I tell you, the bottom rail is on the top.”

Julian sighed.

“Of course,” she said, “if you know who you are, you can go

anywhere.” She said this every time he took her to the reducing

class. “Most of them in it are not our kind of people,” she said,

“but I can be gracious to anybody. I know who I am.”

“They don’t give a damn for your graciousness,” Julian said

savagely. “Knowing who you are is good for one generation

only. You haven’t the foggiest idea where you stand now or

who you are.”

She stopped and allowed her eyes to flash at him. “I most

certainly do know who I am,” she said, “and if you don’t know

who you are, I’m ashamed of you.”

“Oh hell,” Julian said.

“Your great-grandfather was a former governor of this state,”

she said. “Your grandfather was a prosperous landowner. Your

grandmother was a Godhigh.”

“Will you look around you,” he said tensely, “and see where

you are now?” and he swept his arm jerkily out to indicate the

neighborhood, which the growing darkness at least made less

dingy.

“You remain what you are,” she said. “Your great-grandfather

had a plantation and two hundred slaves.”

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FLANNERY O’CONNOR

“There are no more slaves,” he said irritably.

“They were better off when they were,” she said. He groaned

to see that she was off on that topic. She rolled onto it every

few days like a train on an open track. He knew every stop,

every junction, every swamp along the way, and knew the exact

point at which her conclusion would roll majestically into the

station: “It’s ridiculous. It’s simply not realistic. They should

rise, yes, but on their own side of the fence.”

“Let’s skip it,” Julian said.

“The ones I feel sorry for,” she said, “are the ones that are

half white. They’re tragic.”

“Will you skip it?”

“Suppose we were half white. We would certainly have

mixed feelings.”

“I have mixed feelings now,” he groaned.

“Well let’s talk about something pleasant,” she said.

“I remember going to Grandpa’s when I was a little girl. Then

the house had double stairways that went up to what was really

the second floor—all the cooking was done on the first. I used

to like to stay down in the kitchen on account of the way the

walls smelled. I would sit with my nose pressed against the

plaster and take deep breaths. Actually the place belonged to

the Godhighs but your grandfather Chestny paid the mortgage

and saved it for them. They were in reduced circumstances,”

she said, “but reduced or not, they never forgot who they

were.”

“Doubtless that decayed mansion reminded them,” Julian

muttered. He never spoke of it without contempt or thought

of it without longing. He had seen it once when he was a child

before it had been sold. The double stairways had rotted and

been torn down. Negroes were living in it. But it remained in

his mind as his mother had known it. It appeared in his dreams

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Everything That Rises Must Converge

regularly. He would stand on the wide porch, listening to the

rustle of oak leaves, then wander through the high-ceilinged

hall into the parlor that opened onto it and gaze at the worn

rugs and faded draperies. It occurred to him that it was he, not

she, who could have appreciated it. He preferred its threadbare

elegance to anything he could name and it was because of it

that all the neighborhoods they had lived in had been a tor-

ment to him—whereas she had hardly known the difference.

She called her insensitivity “being adjustable.”

“And I remember the old darky who was my nurse, Caroline.

There was no better person in the world. I’ve always had a great

respect for my colored friends,” she said. “I’d do anything in

the world for them and they’d . . .”

“Will you for God’s sake get off that subject?” Julian said.

When he got on a bus by himself, he made it a point to sit

down beside a Negro, in reparation as it were for his mother’s

sins.

“You’re mighty touchy tonight,” she said. “Do you feel all

right?”

“Yes I feel all right,” he said. “Now lay off.”

She pursed her lips. “Well, you certainly are in a vile humor,”

she observed. “I just won’t speak to you at all.”

They had reached the bus stop. There was no bus in sight

and Julian, his hands still jammed in his pockets and his head

thrust forward, scowled down the empty street. The frustration

of having to wait on the bus as well as ride on it began to creep

up his neck like a hot hand. The presence of his mother was

borne in upon him as she gave a pained sigh. He looked at her

bleakly. She was holding herself very erect under the prepos-

terous hat, wearing it like a banner of her imaginary dignity.

There was in him an evil urge to break her spirit. He suddenly

unloosened his tie and pulled it off and put it in his pocket.

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FLANNERY O’CONNOR

She stiffened. “Why must you look like that when you take

me to town?” she said. “Why must you deliberately embarrass

me?”

“If you’ll never learn where you are,” he said, “you can at

least learn where I am.”

“You look like a—thug,” she said.

“Then I must be one,” he murmured.

“I’ll just go home,” she said. “I will not bother you. If you

can’t do a little thing like that for me . . .”

Rolling his eyes upward, he put his tie back on. “Restored

to my class,” he muttered. He thrust his face toward her and

hissed, “True culture is in the mind, the mind,” he said, and

tapped his head, “the mind.”

“It’s in the heart,” she said, “and in how you do things and

how you do things is because of who you are.”

“Nobody in the damn bus cares who you are.”

“I care who I am,” she said icily.

The lighted bus appeared on top of the next hill and as it

approached, they moved out into the street to meet it. He put

his hand under her elbow and hoisted her up on the creak-

ing step. She entered with a little smile, as if she were going

into a drawing room where everyone had been waiting for her.

While he put in the tokens, she sat down on one of the broad

front seats for three which faced the aisle. A thin woman with

protruding teeth and long yellow hair was sitting on the end

of it. His mother moved up beside her and left room for Julian

beside herself. He sat down and looked at the floor across the

aisle where a pair of thin feet in red and white canvas sandals

were planted.

His mother immediately began a general conversation

meant to attract anyone who felt like talking. “Can it get any

hotter?” she said and removed from her purse a folding fan,

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Everything That Rises Must Converge

black with a Japanese scene on it, which she began to flutter

before her.

“I reckon it might could,” the woman with the protruding

teeth said, “but I know for a fact my apartment couldn’t get no

hotter.”

“It must get the afternoon sun,” his mother said. She sat

forward and looked up and down the bus. It was half filled.

Everybody was white. “I see we have the bus to ourselves,” she

said. Julian cringed.

“For a change,” said the woman across the aisle, the owner

of the red and white canvas sandals. “I come on one the other

day and they were thick as fleas—up front and all through.”

“The world is in a mess everywhere,” his mother said. “I don’t

know how we’ve let it get in this fix.”

“What gets my goat is all those boys from good families

stealing automobile tires,” the woman with the protruding

teeth said. “I told my boy, I said you may not be rich but you

been raised right and if I ever catch you in any such mess,

they can send you on to the reformatory. Be exactly where

you belong.”

“Training tells,” his mother said. “Is your boy in high school?”

“Ninth grade,” the woman said.

“My son just finished college last year. He wants to write but

he’s selling typewriters until he gets started,” his mother said.

The woman leaned forward and peered at Julian. He threw

her such a malevolent look that she subsided against the seat.

On the floor across the aisle there was an abandoned newspa-

per. He got up and got it and opened it out in front of him.

His mother discreetly continued the conversation in a lower

tone but the woman across the aisle said in a loud voice, “Well

that’s nice. Selling typewriters is close to writing. He can go

right from one to the other.”

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280

FLANNERY O’CONNOR

“I tell him,” his mother said, “that Rome wasn’t built in a

day.”

Behind the newspaper Julian was withdrawing into the inner

compartment of his mind where he spent most of his time. This

was a kind of mental bubble in which he established himself

when he could not bear to be a part of what was going on

around him. From it he could see out and judge but in it he

was safe from any kind of penetration from without. It was the

only place where he felt free of the general idiocy of his fellows.

His mother had never entered it but from it he could see her

with absolute clarity.

The old lady was clever enough and he thought that if she

had started from any of the right premises, more might have

been expected of her. She lived according to the laws of her

own fantasy world outside of which he had never seen her set

foot. The law of it was to sacrifice herself for him after she had

first created the necessity to do so by making a mess of things.

If he had permitted her sacrifices, it was only because her lack

of foresight had made them necessary. All of her life had been

a struggle to act like a Chestny without the Chestny goods, and

to give him everything she thought a Chestny ought to have;

but since, said she, it was fun to struggle, why complain? And

when you had won, as she had won, what fun to look back on

the hard times! He could not forgive her that she had enjoyed

the struggle and that she thought she had won.

What she meant when she said she had won was that she

had brought him up successfully and had sent him to college

and that he had turned out so well—good looking (her teeth

had gone unfilled so that his could be straightened), intelligent

(he realized he was too intelligent to be a success), and with

a future ahead of him (there was of course no future ahead of

him). She excused his gloominess on the grounds that he was

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Everything That Rises Must Converge

still growing up and his radical ideas on his lack of practical

experience. She said he didn’t yet know a thing about “life,”

that he hadn’t even entered the real world—when already he

was as disenchanted with it as a man of fifty.

The further irony of all this was that in spite of her, he had

turned out so well. In spite of going to only a third-rate col-

lege, he had, on his own initiative, come out with a first-rate

education; in spite of growing up dominated by a small mind,

he had ended up with a large one; in spite of all her foolish

views, he was free of prejudice and unafraid to face facts. Most

miraculous of all, instead of being blinded by love for her as

she was for him, he had cut himself emotionally free of her and

could see her with complete objectivity. He was not dominated

by his mother.

The bus stopped with a sudden jerk and shook him from

his meditation. A woman from the back lurched forward with

little steps and barely escaped falling in his newspaper as she

righted herself. She got off and a large Negro got on. Julian kept

his paper lowered to watch. It gave him a certain satisfaction

to see injustice in daily operation. It confirmed his view that

with a few exceptions there was no one worth knowing within

a radius of three hundred miles. The Negro was well dressed

and carried a briefcase. He looked around and then sat down

on the other end of the seat where the woman with the red

and white canvas sandals was sitting. He immediately unfolded

a newspaper and obscured himself behind it. Julian’s mother’s

elbow at once prodded insistently into his ribs. “Now you see

why I won’t ride on these buses by myself,” she whispered.

The woman with the red and white canvas sandals had risen

at the same time the Negro sat down and had gone further back

in the bus and taken the seat of the woman who had got off.

His mother leaned forward and cast her an approving look.

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FLANNERY O’CONNOR

Julian rose, crossed the aisle, and sat down in the place of the

woman with the canvas sandals. From this position, he looked

serenely across at his mother. Her face had turned an angry

red. He stared at her, making his eyes the eyes of a stranger.

He felt his tension suddenly lift as if he had openly declared

war on her.

He would have liked to get in conversation with the Negro

and to talk with him about art or politics or any subject that

would be above the comprehension of those around them, but

the man remained entrenched behind his paper. He was either

ignoring the change of seating or had never noticed it. There

was no way for Julian to convey his sympathy.

His mother kept her eyes fixed reproachfully on his face. The

woman with the protruding teeth was looking at him avidly as

if he were a type of monster new to her.

“Do you have a light?” he asked the Negro.

Without looking away from his paper, the man reached in

his pocket and handed him a packet of matches.

“Thanks,” Julian said. For a moment he held the matches

foolishly. A no smoking sign looked down upon him from over

the door. This alone would not have deterred him; he had no

cigarettes. He had quit smoking some months before because

he could not afford it. “Sorry,” he muttered and handed back

the matches. The Negro lowered the paper and gave him an

annoyed look. He took the matches and raised the paper again.

His mother continued to gaze at him but she did not take

advantage of his momentary discomfort. Her eyes retained their

battered look. Her face seemed to be unnaturally red, as if her

blood pressure had risen. Julian allowed no glimmer of sympathy

to show on his face. Having got the advantage, he wanted des-

perately to keep it and carry it through. He would have liked to

teach her a lesson that would last her a while, but there seemed

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Everything That Rises Must Converge

no way to continue the point. The Negro refused to come out

from behind his paper.

Julian folded his arms and looked stolidly before him, facing

her but as if he did not see her, as if he had ceased to recognize

her existence. He visualized a scene in which, the bus having

reached their stop, he would remain in his seat and when she

said, “Aren’t you going to get off?” he would look at her as at

a stranger who had rashly addressed him. The corner they got

off on was usually deserted, but it was well lighted and it would

not hurt her to walk by herself the four blocks to the Y. He

decided to wait until the time came and then decide whether

or not he would let her get off by herself. He would have to

be at the Y at ten to bring her back, but he could leave her

wondering if he was going to show up. There was no reason

for her to think she could always depend on him.

He retired again into the high-ceilinged room sparsely set-

tled with large pieces of antique furniture. His soul expanded

momentarily but then he became aware of his mother across

from him and the vision shriveled. He studied her coldly. Her

feet in little pumps dangled like a child’s and did not quite

reach the floor. She was training on him an exaggerated look

of reproach. He felt completely detached from her. At that

moment he could with pleasure have slapped her as he would

have slapped a particularly obnoxious child in his charge.

He began to imagine various unlikely ways by which he

could teach her a lesson. He might make friends with some

distinguished Negro professor or lawyer and bring him home to

spend the evening. He would be entirely justified but her blood

pressure would rise to 300. He could not push her to the extent

of making her have a stroke, and moreover, he had never been

successful at making any Negro friends. He had tried to strike up

an acquaintance on the bus with some of the better types, with

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FLANNERY O’CONNOR

ones that looked like professors or ministers or lawyers. One

morning he had sat down next to a distinguished-looking dark

brown man who had answered his questions with a sonorous

solemnity but who had turned out to be an undertaker. Another

day he had sat down beside a cigar-smoking Negro with a dia-

mond ring on his finger, but after a few stilted pleasantries,

the Negro had rung the buzzer and risen, slipping two lottery

tickets into Julian’s hand as he climbed over him to leave.

He imagined his mother lying desperately ill and his being

able to secure only a Negro doctor for her. He toyed with that

idea for a few minutes and then dropped it for a momentary

vision of himself participating as a sympathizer in a sit-in dem-

onstration. This was possible but he did not linger with it.

Instead, he approached the ultimate horror. He brought home

a beautiful suspiciously Negroid woman. Prepare yourself, he

said. There is nothing you can do about it. This is the woman

I’ve chosen. She’s intelligent, dignified, even good, and she’s

suffered and she hasn’t thought it fun. Now persecute us, go

ahead and persecute us. Drive her out of here, but remember,

you’re driving me too. His eyes were narrowed and through the

indignation he had generated, he saw his mother across the

aisle, purple-faced, shrunken to the dwarf-like proportions of

her moral nature, sitting like a mummy beneath the ridiculous

banner of her hat.

He was tilted out of his fantasy again as the bus stopped.

The door opened with a sucking hiss and out of the dark a

large, gaily dressed, sullen-looking colored woman got on with

a little boy. The child, who might have been four, had on a

short plaid suit and a Tyrolean hat with a blue feather in it.

Julian hoped that he would sit down beside him and that the

woman would push in beside his mother. He could think of no

better arrangement.

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Everything That Rises Must Converge

As she waited for her tokens, the woman was surveying the

seating possibilities—he hoped with the idea of sitting where

she was least wanted. There was something familiar-looking

about her but Julian could not place what it was. She was a

giant of a woman. Her face was set not only to meet opposition

but to seek it out. The downward tilt of her large lower lip was

like a warning sign: don’t tamper with me. Her bulging figure

was encased in a green crepe dress and her feet overflowed in

red shoes. She had on a hideous hat. A purple velvet flap came

down on one side of it and stood up on the other; the rest of it

was green and looked like a cushion with the stuffing out. She

carried a mammoth red pocketbook that bulged throughout as

if it were stuffed with rocks.

To Julian’s disappointment, the little boy climbed up on

the empty seat beside his mother. His mother lumped all chil-

dren, black and white, into the common category, “cute,” and

she thought little Negroes were on the whole cuter than little

white children. She smiled at the little boy as he climbed on

the seat.

Meanwhile the woman was bearing down upon the empty

seat beside Julian. To his annoyance, she squeezed herself into

it. He saw his mother’s face change as the woman settled her-

self next to him and he realized with satisfaction that this was

more objectionable to her than it was to him. Her face seemed

almost gray and there was a look of dull recognition in her eyes,

as if suddenly she had sickened at some awful confrontation.

Julian saw that it was because she and the woman had, in a

sense, swapped sons. Though his mother would not realize the

symbolic significance of this, she would feel it. His amusement

showed plainly on his face.

The woman next to him muttered something unintelligible

to herself. He was conscious of a kind of bristling next to him,

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FLANNERY O’CONNOR

muted growling like that of an angry cat. He could not see

anything but the red pocketbook upright on the bulging green

thighs. He visualized the woman as she had stood waiting for

her tokens—the ponderous figure, rising from the red shoes

upward over the solid hips, the mammoth bosom, the haughty

face, to the green and purple hat.

His eyes widened.

The vision of the two hats, identical, broke upon him with

the radiance of a brilliant sunrise. His face was suddenly lit

with joy. He could not believe that Fate had thrust upon his

mother such a lesson. He gave a loud chuckle so that she

would look at him and see that he saw. She turned her eyes

on him slowly. The blue in them seemed to have turned a

bruised purple. For a moment he had an uncomfortable sense

of her innocence, but it lasted only a second before principle

rescued him. Justice entitled him to laugh. His grin hardened

until it said to her as plainly as if he were saying aloud: Your

punishment exactly fits your pettiness. This should teach you

a permanent lesson.

Her eyes shifted to the woman. She seemed unable to bear

looking at him and to find the woman preferable. He became

conscious again of the bristling presence at his side. The

woman was rumbling like a volcano about to become active.

His mother’s mouth began to twitch slightly at one corner.

With a sinking heart, he saw incipient signs of recovery on her

face and realized that this was going to strike her suddenly as

funny and was going to be no lesson at all. She kept her eyes

on the woman and an amused smile came over her face as if

the woman were a monkey that had stolen her hat. The little

Negro was looking up at her with large fascinated eyes. He had

been trying to attract her attention for some time.

“Carver!” the woman said suddenly. “Come heah!”

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Everything That Rises Must Converge

When he saw that the spotlight was on him at last, Carver

drew his feet up and turned himself toward Julian’s mother and

giggled.

“Carver!” the woman said. “You heah me? Come heah!”

Carver slid down from the seat but remained squatting with

his back against the base of it, his head turned slyly around

toward Julian’s mother, who was smiling at him. The woman

reached a hand across the aisle and snatched him to her. He

righted himself and hung backwards on her knees, grinning

at Julian’s mother. “Isn’t he cute?” Julian’s mother said to the

woman with the protruding teeth.

“I reckon he is,” the woman said without conviction.

The Negress yanked him upright but he eased out of her grip

and shot across the aisle and scrambled, giggling wildly, onto

the seat beside his love.

“I think he likes me,” Julian’s mother said, and smiled at

the woman. It was the smile she used when she was being

particularly gracious to an inferior. Julian saw everything lost.

The lesson had rolled off her like rain on a roof.

The woman stood up and yanked the little boy off the seat

as if she were snatching him from contagion. Julian could feel

the rage in her at having no weapon like his mother’s smile.

She gave the child a sharp slap across his leg. He howled once

and then thrust his head into her stomach and kicked his fret

against her shins. “Behave,” she said vehemently.

The bus stopped and the Negro who had been reading the

newspaper got off. The woman moved over and set the little

boy down with a thump between herself and Julian. She held

him firmly by the knee. In a moment he put his hands in front

of his face and peeped at Julian’s mother through his fingers.

“I see yoooooooo!” she said and put her hand in front of her

face and peeped at him.

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FLANNERY O’CONNOR

The woman slapped his hand down. “Quit yo’ foolishness,”

she said, “before I knock the living Jesus out of you!”

Julian was thankful that the next stop was theirs. He reached

up and pulled the cord. The woman reached up and pulled it

at the same time. Oh my God, he thought. He had the terrible

intuition that when they got off the bus together, his mother

would open her purse and give the little boy a nickel. The ges-

ture would be as natural to her as breathing. The bus stopped

and the woman got up and lunged to the front, dragging the

child, who wished to stay on, after her. Julian and his mother

got up and followed. As they neared the door, Julian tried to

relieve her of her pocketbook.

“No,” she murmured, “I want to give the little boy a nickel.”

“No!” Julian hissed. “No!”

She smiled down at the child and opened her bag. The bus

door opened and the woman picked him up by the arm and

descended with him, hanging at her hip. Once in the street she

set him down and shook him.

Julian’s mother had to close her purse while she got down

the bus step but as soon as her feet were on the ground, she

opened it again and began to rummage inside. “I can’t find but

a penny,” she whispered, “but it looks like a new one.”

“Don’t do it!” Julian said fiercely between his teeth. There

was a streetlight on the corner and she hurried to get under it

so that she could better see into her pocketbook. The woman

was heading off rapidly down the street with the child still

hanging backward on her hand.

“Oh little boy!” Julian’s mother called and took a few quick

steps and caught up with them just beyond the lamppost. “Here’s

a bright new penny for you,” and she held out the coin, which

shone bronze in the dim light.

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Everything That Rises Must Converge

The huge woman turned and for a moment stood, her shoul-

ders lifted and her face frozen with frustrated rage, and stared

at Julian’s mother. Then all at once she seemed to explode

like a piece of machinery that had been given one ounce of

pressure too much. Julian saw the black fist swing out with the

red pocketbook. He shut his eyes and cringed as he heard the

woman shout, “He don’t take nobody’s pennies!” When he

opened his eyes, the woman was disappearing down the street

with the little boy staring wide-eyed over her shoulder. Julian’s

mother was sitting on the sidewalk.

“I told you not to do that,” Julian said angrily. “I told you

not to do that!”

He stood over her for a minute, gritting his teeth. Her legs

were stretched out in front of her and her hat was on her lap.

He squatted down and looked her in the face. It was totally

expressionless. “You got exactly what you deserved,” he said.

“Now get up.”

He picked up her pocketbook and put what had fallen out

back in it. He picked the hat up off her lap. The penny caught

his eye on the sidewalk and he picked that up and let it drop

before her eyes into the purse. Then he stood up and leaned

over and held his hands out to pull her up. She remained immo-

bile. He sighed. Rising above them on either side were black

apartment buildings, marked with irregular rectangles of light.

At the end of the block a man came out of a door and walked

off in the opposite direction. “All right,” he said, “suppose some-

body happens by and wants to know why you’re sitting on the

sidewalk?”

She took the hand and, breathing hard, pulled heavily up

on it and then stood for a moment, swaying slightly as if the

spots of light in the darkness were circling around her. Her eyes,

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FLANNERY O’CONNOR

shadowed and confused, finally settled on his face. He did not

try to conceal his irritation. “I hope this teaches you a lesson,”

he said. She leaned forward and her eyes raked his face. She

seemed trying to determine his identity. Then, as if she found

nothing familiar about him, she started off with a headlong

movement in the wrong direction.

“Aren’t you going on to the Y?” he asked.

“Home,” she muttered.

“Well, are we walking?”

For answer she kept going. Julian followed along, his hands

behind him. He saw no reason to let the lesson she had had

go without backing it up with an explanation of its meaning.

She might as well be made to understand what had happened

to her. “Don’t think that was just an uppity Negro woman,” he

said. “That was the whole colored race which will no longer

take your condescending pennies. That was your black double.

She can wear the same hat as you, and to be sure,” he added

gratuitously (because he thought it was funny), “it looked better

on her than it did on you. What all this means,” he said, “is

that the old world is gone. The old manners are obsolete and

your graciousness is not worth a damn.” He thought bitterly

of the house that had been lost for him. “You aren’t who you

think you are,” he said.

She continued to plow ahead, paying no attention to him.

Her hair had come undone on one side. She dropped her pock-

etbook and took no notice. He stooped and picked it up and

handed it to her but she did not take it.

“You needn’t act as if the world had come to an end,” he

said, “because it hasn’t. From now on you’ve got to live in a

new world and face a few realities for a change. Buck up,” he

said, “it won’t kill you.”

She was breathing fast.

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291

Everything That Rises Must Converge

“Let’s wait on the bus,” he said.

“Home,” she said thickly.

“I hate to see you behave like this,” he said. “Just like a

child. I should be able to expect more of you.” He decided to

stop where he was and make her stop and wait for a bus. “I’m

not going any farther,” he said, stopping. “We’re going on the

bus.”

She continued to go on as if she had not heard him. He took

a few steps and caught her arm and stopped her. He looked into

her face and caught his breath. He was looking into a face he

had never seen before. “Tell Grandpa to come get me,” she

said.

He stared, stricken.

“Tell Caroline to come get me,” she said.

Stunned, he let her go and she lurched forward again, walk-

ing as if one leg were shorter than the other. A tide of dark-

ness seemed to be sweeping her from him. “Mother!” he cried.

“Darling, sweetheart, wait!” Crumpling, she fell to the pave-

ment. He dashed forward and fell at her side, crying, “Mamma,

Mamma!” He turned her over. Her face was fiercely distorted.

One eye, large and staring, moved slightly to the left as if it had

become unmoored. The other remained fixed on him, raked his

face again, found nothing and closed.

“Wait here, wait here!” he cried and jumped up and began

to run for help toward a cluster of lights he saw in the distance

ahead of him. “Help, help!” he shouted, but his voice was thin,

scarcely a thread of sound. The lights drifted farther away the

faster he ran and his feet moved numbly as if they carried him

nowhere. The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to

her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into the

world of guilt and sorrow.

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293

INDEX OF TEMPLATES

introducing what “they say”

(p. 23)

j A number of have recently suggested that

j It has become common today to dismiss .

j In their recent work, Y and Z have offered harsh critiques of

for .

introducing “standard views”

(pp. 23– 24)

j Americans today tend to believe that .

j Conventional wisdom has it that .

j Common sense seems to dictate that .

j The standard way of thinking about topic X has it that .

j It is often said that .

j My whole life I have heard it said that .

j You would think that .

j Many people assume that .

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294

making what “they say” something you say

(pp. 24–25)

j I’ve always believed that .

j When I was a child, I used to think that .

j Although I should know better by now, I cannot help thinking

that .

j At the same time that I believe , I also believe

introducing something implied or assumed

(p. 25)

j Although none of them have ever said so directly, my teachers

have often given me the impression that .

j One implication of X’s treatment of is that

j Although X does not say so directly, she apparently assumes

that .

j While they rarely admit as much, often take for

granted that .

introducing an ongoing debate

(pp. 25–28)

j In discussions of X, one controversial issue has been .

On the one hand, argues . On the other

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Index of Templates

295

hand, contends . Others even maintain

. My own view is .

j When it comes to the topic of , most of us will read-

ily agree that . Where this agreement usually ends,

however, is on the question of . Whereas some are

convinced that , others maintain that .

j In conclusion, then, as I suggested earlier, defenders of

can’t have it both ways. Their assertion that

is contradicted by their claim that .

capturing authorial action

(pp. 38–40)

j X acknowledges that .

j X agrees that .

j X argues that .

j X believes that .

j X denies/does not deny that .

j X claims that .

j X complains that .

j X concedes that .

j X demonstrates that .

j X deplores the tendency to .

j X celebrates the fact that .

j X emphasizes that .

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296

j X insists that .

j X observes that .

j X questions whether .

j X refutes the claim that .

j X reminds us that .

j X reports that .

j X suggests that .

j X urges us to .

introducing quotations

(p. 46)

j X states, “ .”

j As the prominent philosopher X puts it, “ .”

j According to X, “ .”

j X himself writes, “ .”

j In her book, , X maintains that “ ”

j Writing in the journal , X complains that

“ .”

j In X’s view, “ .”

j X agrees when she writes, “ .”

j X disagrees when he writes, “ .”

j X complicates matters further when he writes, “ .”

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Index of Templates

297

explaining quotations

(pp. 46–47)

j Basically, X is saying .

j In other words, X believes .

j In making this comment, X urges us to .

j X is corroborating the age-old adage that .

j X’s point is that .

j The essence of X’s argument is that .

disagreeing, with reasons

(p. 60)

j I think X is mistaken because she overlooks .

j X’s claim that rests upon the questionable assump-

tion that .

j I disagree with X’s view that because, as recent

research has shown, .

j X contradicts herself/can’t have it both ways. On the one

hand, she argues . On the other hand, she also

says .

j By focusing on , X overlooks the deeper problem

of .

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298

agreeing—with a difference

(pp. 61–64)

j I agree that because my experience con-

firms it.

j X surely is right about because, as she may not be

aware, recent studies have shown that .

j X’s theory of is extremely useful because it sheds

insight on the difficult problem of .

j Those unfamiliar with this school of thought may be interested

to know that it basically boils down to .

j I agree that , a point that needs emphasizing since

so many people believe .

j If group X is right that , as I think they are, then we

need to reassess the popular assumption that .

agreeing and disagreeing simultaneously

(pp. 64–66)

j Although I agree with X up to a point, I cannot accept his overall

conclusion that .

j Although I disagree with much that X says, I fully endorse his

final conclusion that .

j Though I concede that , I still insist that .

j Whereas X provides ample evidence that , Y and

Z’s research on and convinces me that

instead.

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Index of Templates

299

j X is right that , but she seems on more dubious

ground when she claims that .

j While X is probably wrong when she claims that ,

she is right that .

j I’m of two minds about X’s claim that . On the one

hand, I agree that . On the other hand, I’m not sure

if .

j My feelings on the issue are mixed. I do support X’s position that

, but I find Y’s argument about and Z’s

research on to be equally persuasive.

signaling who is saying what

(pp. 71–73)

j X argues .

j According to both X and Y, .

j Politicians , X argues, should .

j Most athletes will tell you that .

j My own view, however, is that .

j I agree, as X may not realize, that .

j But are real and, arguably, the most significant fac-

tor in .

j But X is wrong that .

j However, it is simply not true that .

j Indeed, it is highly likely that .

j X’s assertion that does not fit the facts.

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300

j X is right that .

j X is wrong that .

j X is both right and wrong that .

j Yet a sober analysis of the matter reveals .

j Nevertheless, new research shows .

j Anyone familiar with should agree that .

embedding voice markers

(pp. 74–75)

j X overlooks what I consider an important point about .

j My own view is that what X insists is a is in fact

a .

j I wholeheartedly endorse what X calls .

j These conclusions, which X discusses in , add weight

to the argument that .

entertaining objections

(p. 82)

j At this point I would like to raise some objections that have been

inspired by the skeptic in me. She feels that I have been ignor-

ing . “ ,” she says to me, “ .”

j Yet some readers may challenge the view that .

j Of course, many will probably disagree with this assertion

that .

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Index of Templates

301

naming your naysayers

(pp. 83–84)

j Here many would probably object that .

j But would certainly take issue with the argument

that .

, of course, may want to question whether

j Nevertheless, both followers and critics of will prob-

ably argue that .

j Although not all think alike, some of them will prob-

ably dispute my claim that .

j are so diverse in their views that it’s hard to gener-

alize about them, but some are likely to object on the grounds

that .

introducing objections informally

(pp. 84–85)

j But is my proposal realistic? What are the chances of its actually

being adopted?

j Yet is it always true that ? Is it always the case, as

I have been suggesting, that ?

j However, does the evidence I’ve cited prove conclusively that

j “Impossible,” some will say. “You must be reading the research

selectively.”

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302

making concessions while still

standing your ground (p. 89)

j Although I grant that , I still maintain that .

j Proponents of X are right to argue that . But they

exaggerate when they claim that .

j While it is true that , it does not necessarily follow

that .

j On the one hand, I agree with X that . But on the

other hand, I still insist that .

indicating who cares

(pp. 95–96)

j used to think . But recently [or within

the past few decades] suggests that .

j These findings challenge the work of earlier researchers, who

tended to assume that .

j Recent studies like these shed new light on , which

previous studies had not addressed.

j Researchers have long assumed that . For instance,

one eminent scholar of cell biology, , assumed in

, her seminal work on cell structures and func-

tions, that fat cells . As herself put it,

“” (2012). Another leading scientist,

argued that fat cells “ ” (2011). Ultimately, when it came

to the nature of fat, the basic assumption was that .

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Index of Templates

303

But a new body of research shows that fat cells are far more

complex and that .

j If sports enthusiasts stopped to think about it, many of them might

simply assume that the most successful athletes .

However, new research shows .

j These findings challenge neoliberals’ common assumptions

that .

j At first glance, teenagers appear to . But on closer

inspection .

establishing why your claims matter

(pp. 98–99)

j X matters/is important because .

j Although X may seem trivial, it is in fact crucial in terms of today’s

concern over .

j Ultimately, what is at stake here is .

j These findings have important consequences for the broader

domain of .

j My discussion of X is in fact addressing the larger matter

of .

j These conclusions/This discovery will have significant applica-

tions in as well as in .

j Although X may seem of concern to only a small group of

, it should in fact concern anyone who cares about

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304

commonly used transitions

(pp. 108–10)

addition

also in fact

and indeed

besides moreover

furthermore so too

in addition

elaboration

actually to put it another way

by extension to put it bluntly

in short to put it succinctly

that is ultimately

in other words

example

after all for instance

as an illustration speciﬁ cally

consider to take a case in point

for example

cause and effect

accordingly since

as a result so

consequently then

hence therefore

it follows, then thus

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305

comparison

along the same lines likewise

in the same way similarly

contrast

although nevertheless

but nonetheless

by contrast on the contrary

conversely on the other hand

despite regardless

even though whereas

however while

in contrast yet

concession

admittedly of course

although it is true that naturally

granted to be sure

I concede that

conclusion

as a result so

consequently the upshot of all this is that

hence therefore

in conclusion, then thus

in short to sum up

in sum, then to summarize

it follows, then

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306

adding metacommentary

(pp. 131–37)

j In other words, .

j What really means by this is .

j Ultimately, my goal is to demonstrate that .

j My point is not , but .

j To put it another way, .

j In sum, then, .

j My conclusion, then, is that, .

j In short, .

j What is more important, .

j Incidentally, .

j By the way, .

j Chapter 2 explores , while Chapter 3 examines

j Having just argued that , let us now turn our atten-

tion to .

j Although some readers may object that , I would

answer that .

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307

starting with what others say

about a literary work

(pp. 185–88)

j Critic X complains that Author Y’s story is compromised by his

. While there’s some truth to this critique, I argue

that Critic X overlooks .

j According to Critic A, novel X suggests . I agree, but

would add that .

j Several members of our class have suggested that the final mes-

sage of play X is . I agree up to a point, but I still

think that .

j On first reading play Z, I thought it was an uncritical celebra-

tion of . After rereading the play and discussing it in

class, however, I see that it is more critical of than

I originally thought.

j It might be said that poem Y is chiefly about . But

the problem with this reading, in my view, is .

j Though religious readers might be tempted to analyze poem X

as a parable about , a closer examination suggests

that the poem is in fact about .

responding to other interpretations

of a literary work

(p. 191)

j It might be argued that in the clash between character X and

Y in play Z, the author wants us to favor character Y, since she

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INDEX OF TEMPLATES

308

is presented as the play’s heroine. I contend, however, that

j Several critics seem to assume that poem X endorses the values

of represented by the image of over

those of represented by the image of .

I agree, but with the following caveat: .

showing evidence when writing

about a literary work

(pp. 194–96)

j Although some might read the metaphor of in this

poem as evidence, that for Author X, , I see it as

j Some might claim that evidence X suggests , but I

argue that, on the contrary, it suggests .

j I agree with my classmate that the image of

in novel Y is evidence of . Unlike

, however, I think .

explain what the data mean

(p. 211)

j Our data support / confirm / verify the work of X by showing that

j By demonstrating , X’s work extends the findings

of Y.

j The results of X contradict/refute Y’s conclusion that .

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Index of Templates

309

j X’s findings call into question the widely accepted theory that

j Our data are consistent with X’s hypothesis that .

explaining an experimental result

(p. 214)

j One explanation for X’s finding of is that .

An alternative explanation is .

j The difference between and is prob-

ably due to .

introducing gaps in the existing research

(p. 228)

j Studies of X have indicated . It is not clear, however,

that this conclusion applies to .

j often take for granted that . Few have

investigated this assumption, however.

j X’s work tells us a great deal about . Can this work

be generalized to ?

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311

credits

text

Barbara Ehrenreich: From Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the Ameri-

of Henry Holt and Company, LLC and International Creative Management.

Gerald Graff: “Hidden Intellectualism,” adapted from Clueless in Academe:

Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press.

Richard A. Muller: From Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the

by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Flannery O’Connor: “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” from The Com-

Giroux and Harold Matson Company, Inc.

Eric Schlosser: “A People’s Democratic Platform,” The Nation, August 2, 2004.

Reprinted by permission.

David Zinczenko: “Don’t Blame the Eater,” The New York Times, November 23,

photographs

Century Fox/Courtesy Everett Collection. Chapter 15: p. 195: Duck or Rabbit:

Wikimedia. Readings: p. 253: Yucca Mountain, Nevada: Wikimedia.

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313

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Like the previous two editions, this one would never have

seen print if it weren’t for Marilyn Moller, our superb editor at

Norton, and the extraordinary job she has done of inspiring,

commenting on, rewriting (and then rewriting and rewriting

again) our many drafts. Our friendship with Marilyn is one of

the most cherished things to have developed from this project.

Our thanks go as well to Tenyia Lee, Julia Reidhead, Marian

Johnson, Peter Simon, and Spencer Richardson-Jones for

their incisive comments and suggestions on the new chapter

on writing about literature; to Ariella Foss, Rebecca Homiski,

Andy Ensor, and Ashley Horna for managing the editing

and production of this edition; and to Cliff Landesman and

Michal Brody for curating and producing the fabulous blog that

accompanies this book, theysayiblog.

We thank John Darger, our Norton representative, who

offered early encouragement to write this book—and give spe-

cial thanks to Lib Triplett and all the Norton travelers for the

superb work they’ve done on behalf of our book.

We owe a special debt of gratitude to Christopher Gillen

and Erin Ackerman for their chapters on writing in the hard

and social sciences, respectively. Working with Chris and Erin

proved to be an exhilarating experience; we learned a great deal

by seeing how they applied our ideas to their disciplines.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

314

We owe special thanks to our colleagues in the English

department at the University of Illinois at Chicago: Mark

Canuel, our former department head, for supporting our earlier

efforts overseeing the university’s Writing in the Disciplines

requirement; Walter Benn Michaels, our current department

head; and Ann Feldman, former Director of University Writing

Programs, for encouraging us to teach ﬁ rst-year composition

courses at UIC in which we could try out ideas and drafts of our

manuscript; Tom Moss, Diane Chin, Vainis Aleksa, and Matt

Pavesich, who have also been very supportive of our efforts; and

Matt Oakes, our former research assistant. We are also grateful

to Ann, Diane, and Mark Bennett for bringing us into their

graduate course on the teaching of writing, and to Lisa Freeman,

John Huntington, Walter Benn Michaels, and Ralph Cintron,

for inviting us to present our ideas in the keynote lecture at

UIC’s 2013 “Composition Matters” conference.

We are also especially grateful to Steve Benton and Nadya

Pittendrigh, who taught a section of composition with us using

an early draft of this book. Steve made many helpful sugges-

tions, particularly regarding the exercises. We are grateful to

Andy Young, a lecturer at UIC who has tested our book in

his courses and who gave us extremely helpful feedback. And

we thank Vershawn A. Young, whose work on code-meshing

inﬂ uenced our argument in Chapter 9, and Hillel Crandus,

whose classroom handout inspired the chapter on “Entering

Classroom Discussions.”

We are grateful to the many colleagues and friends who’ve

let us talk our ideas out with them and given extremely helpful

responses. UIC’s former dean, Stanley Fish, has been central

in this respect, both in personal conversations and in his inci-

sive articles calling for greater focus on form in the teaching

of writing. Our conversations with Jane Tompkins have also

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315

Acknowledgments

been integral to this book, as was the composition course that

Jane co-taught with Gerald entitled “Can We Talk?” Lenny

Davis, too, offered both intellectual insight and emotional

support, as did Heather Arnet, Jennifer Ashton, Janet Atwill,

Kyra Auslander, Noel Barker, Jim Benton, Jack Brereton,

Tim Cantrick, Marsha Cassidy, David Chinitz, Lisa Chinitz,

Pat Chu, Duane Davis, Bridget O’Rourke Flisk, Steve Flisk,

Judy Gardiner, Howard Gardner, Rich Gelb, Gwynne Gertz,

Jeff Gore, Bill Haddad, Ben Hale, Scott Hammerl, Patricia

Harkin, Andy Hoberek, John Huntington, Joe Janangelo, Paul

Jay, David Jolliffe, Nancy Kohn, Don Lazere, Jo Liebermann,

Steven Mailloux, Deirdre McCloskey, Maurice J. Meilleur,

Alan Meyers, Greg Meyerson, Anna Minkov, Chris Newﬁ eld,

Jim Phelan, Paul Psilos, Bruce Robbins, Charles Ross, Eileen

Seifert, Evan Seymour, David Shumway, Herb Simons, Jim

Sosnoski, David Steiner, Harold Veeser, Chuck Venegoni,

Marla Weeg, Jerry Wexler, Joyce Wexler, Virginia Wexman,

Jeffrey Williams, Lynn Woodbury, and the late Wayne Booth,

whose friendship we dearly miss.

We are grateful for having had the opportunity to present

our ideas to a number of schools: University of Arkansas at

Little Rock, Augustana College, Brandeis University, Brigham

Young University, Bryn Mawr College, Case Western Uni-

versity, Columbia University, Community College of Phila-

delphia, California State University at Bakersﬁ eld, California

State University at Northridge, University of California at

Riverside, University of Delaware, DePauw University, Drew

University, Duke University, Duquesne University, Elmhurst

College, Emory University, Fontbonne University, Furman

University, Gettysburg College, Harper College, Harvard

University, Haverford College, Hawaii Ofﬁ ce of Secondary

School Curriculum Instruction, Hunter College, University of

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

316

Illinois College of Medicine, Illinois State University, John Car-

roll University, Kansas State University, Lawrence University,

the Lawrenceville School, University of Louisiana at Lafayette,

MacEwan University, University of Maryland at College Park,

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Memphis,

Miami University, University of Missouri at Columbia, New

Trier High School, State University of New York at Geneseo,

State University of New York at Stony Brook, North Caro-

lina A&T University, University of North Florida, Northern

Michigan University, Norwalk Community College, North-

western University Division of Continuing Studies, Univer-

sity of Notre Dame, Ohio Wesleyan University, Oregon State

University, University of Portland, University of Rochester,

St. Ambrose University, St. Andrew’s School, St. Charles

High School, Seattle University, Southern Connecticut State

University, South Elgin High School, University of South

Florida, University of Southern Mississippi, Swarthmore Col-

lege, Teachers College, University of Tennessee at Knoxville,

University of Texas at Arlington, Tulane University, Union

College, Ursinus College, Wabash College, Washington Col-

lege, University of Washington, Western Michigan University,

Westinghouse/Kenwood High Schools, University of West Vir-

ginia at Morgantown, Wheaton Warrenville English Chairs,

and the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater.

We particularly thank those who helped arrange these visits

and discussed writing issues with us: Jeff Abernathy, Herman

Asarnow, John Austin, Greg Barnheisel, John Bean, Crystal

Benedicks, Joe Bizup, Sheridan Blau, Dagne Bloland, Chris

Breu, Mark Brouwer, Joan Johnson Bube, John Caldwell,

Gregory Clark, Irene Clark, Dean Philip Cohen, Cathy

D’Agostino, Tom Deans, Gaurav Desai, Lisa Dresdner, Kathleen

Dudden-Rowlands, Lisa Ede, Alexia Ellett, Emory Elliott,

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317

Acknowledgments

Anthony Ellis, Kim Flachmann, Ronald Fortune, Rosanna

Fukuda, George Haggerty, Donald Hall, Joe Harris, Gary Hatch,

Elizabeth Hatmaker, Harry Hellenbrand, Nicole Henderson,

Doug Hesse, Donna Heiland, Van Hillard, Andrew Hoberek,

Michael Hustedde, Sara Jameson, T. R. Johnson, David Jones,

Ann Kaplan, Don Kartiganer, Linda Kinnahan, Dean Georg

Kleine, Albert Labriola, Craig Lawrence, Lori Lopez, Tom Liam

Lynch, Michael Mays, Hiram Maxim, Thomas McFadden,

Sean Meehan, Connie Mick, Joseph Musser, Margaret Oakes,

John O’Connor, Gary Olson, Tom Pace, Les Perelman, Emily

Poe, Dominick Randolph, Clancy Ratliff, Monica Rico, Kelly

Ritter, Jack Robinson, Warren Rosenberg, Laura Rosenthal,

Dean Howard Ross, Deborah Rossen-Knill, Paul Schacht,

Petra Schatz, Evan Seymour, Rose Shapiro, Mike Shea, Ceci-

lia M. Shore, Erec Smith, Nancy Sommers, Stephen Spector,

Timothy Spurgin, Ron Strickland, Trig Thoreson, Josh Toth,

Judy Trost, Aiman Tulamait, Charles Tung, John Webster,

Sandi Weisenberg, Robert Weisbuch, Karin Westman, Martha

Woodmansee, and Lynn Worsham.

We also wish to extend particular thanks to two Chicago

area educators who have worked closely with us: Les Lynn of the

Chicago Debate League and Eileen Murphy of CERCA. Lastly,

we wish to thank two high school teachers for their excellent

and inventive adaptations of our work: Mark Gozonsky in his

YouTube video clip, “Building Blocks,” and Dave Stuart, Jr. in

his blog, “Teaching the Core.”

For inviting us to present our ideas at their conferences

we are grateful to John Brereton and Richard Wendorf at the

Boston Athenaeum; Wendy Katkin of the Reinvention Cen-

ter of State University of New York at Stony Brook; Luchen

Li of the Michigan English Association; Lisa Lee and Barbara

Ransby of the Public Square in Chicago; Don Lazere of the

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

318

University of Tennessee at Knoxville; Dennis Baron of the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Alﬁ e Guy of Yale

University; Irene Clark of the California State University of

Northridge; George Crandell and Steve Hubbard, co-directors

of the ACETA conference at Auburn University; Mary Beth

Rose of the Humanities Institute at the University of Illinois

at Chicago; Diana Smith of St. Anne’s Belﬁ eld School and

the University of Virginia; Jim Maddox and Victor Luftig of

the Bread Loaf School of English; Jan Fitzsimmons and Jerry

Berberet of the Associated Colleges of Illinois; and Rosemary

Feal, Executive Director of the Modern Language Association.

A very special thanks goes to those who reviewed materials

for the third edition: Carrie Bailey (Clark College); Heather

Barrett (Boston University), Amy Bennett-Zendzian (Boston

University); Seth Blumenthal (Boston University); Ron Brooks

(Oklahoma State University); Jonathan Cook (Durham Tech-

nical Community College); Tessa Croker (Boston University);

Perry Cumbie (Durham Technical Community College); Rob-

ert Danberg (Binghamton University); Elias Dominguez Barajas

(University of Arkansas); Nancy Enright (Seton Hall Uni-

versity); Jason Evans (Prairie State College); Ted Fitts (Bos-

ton University); Karen Gaffney (Raritan Valley Community

College); Karen Gardiner (University of Alabama); Stephen

Hodin (Boston University); Michael Horwitz (University of

Hartford); John Hyman (American University); Claire Kervin

(Boston University); Melinda Kreth (Central Michigan Uni-

versity); Heather Marcovitch (Red Deer College); Chris-

tina Michaud (Boston University); Marisa Milanese (Boston

University); Theresa Mooney (Austin Community College);

Roxanne Munch (Joliet Junior College); Sarah Quirk (Wau-

bonsee Community College); Lauri Ramey (California State

University, Los Angeles); David Shawn (Boston University);

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319

Acknowledgments

Jennifer Sia (Boston University); Laura Sonderman (Marshall

University); Katherine Stebbins McCaffrey (Boston Univer-

sity); K. Sullivan (Lane Community College); Anne-Marie

Thomas (Austin Community College at Riverside); Eliot

Treichel (Lane Community College); Rosanna Walker (Lane

Community College); Mary Erica Zimmer (Boston University).

We also thank those who reviewed the literature chapter:

Julie Bowman (Carnegie Mellon University); Jim Burke (Burlin-

game High School); Ana Cooke (Carnegie Mellon University);

Lisa Ede (Oregon State University); Karen Gocsik (University

of California at San Diego); Priscilla Glanville (State College

of Florida); Melissa Goldthwaite (Saint Joseph’s University);

Rafey Habib (Rutgers University at Camden); Michael Hen-

nessy (Texas State University); Alexis Teagarden (Carnegie

Mellon University).

Thanks to those who reviewed the materials for the second

edition: Erin Ackerman (City University of New York–John

Jay College); Mary Angeline (University of Northern Colo-

rado); Ned Bachus (Community College of Philadelphia);

Michelle Ballif (University of Georgia); Jonathan Barz (Uni-

versity of Dubuque); Mary Bauer Morley (University of North

Dakota); Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter (Oakland University);

Michelle Boswell (University of Maryland); Laura Bowles

(University of Central Arkansas); E. Brand (Broome Commu-

nity College); Beth Buyserie (Washington State University);

Dana Cairns Watson (University of California, Los Angeles);

Genevieve Carminati (Montgomery College); Brent Ches-

ley (Aquinas College); Joseph Colavito (Butler University);

Tara DaPra (University of Minnesota); Emily Detmer-Goebel

(Northern Kentucky University); J. Michael Duvall (College

of Charleston); Adriana Estill (Carleton College); Ralph Faris

(Community College of Philadelphia); Chris Gillen (Kenyon

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

320

College); Patricia Gillikin (University of New Mexico Valencia

Campus); Kenneth Grant (University of Wisconsin–Baraboo/

Sauk County); Kevin Grifﬁ th (Capital University); Annemarie

Hamlin (Central Oregon Community College); Rick Hansen

(California State University, Fresno); John Hare (Montgomery

College); Wendy Hayden (Hunter College of the City Uni-

versity of New York); Karen Head (Georgia Institute of Tech-

nology); Chene Heady (Longwood University); Nels Highberg

(University of Hartford); Victoria Holladay (California State

University, Los Angeles); D. Kern Holoman (University

of California, Davis); Elizabeth Huergo (Montgomery Col-

lege); Sara Jameson (Oregon State University); Joseph Jones

(University of Memphis); Andrew Keitt (University of Ala-

bama at Birmingham); Kurt Koenigsberger (Case Western

Reserve University); Gary Leising (Utica College); Gary

Lewandowski (Monmouth University); Michelle Maher

(La Roche College); Lisa Martin (University of Wisconsin–

Baraboo/Sauk County); Miles McCrimmon (J. Sargeant

Reynolds Community College); Jacqueline Megow (Oklahoma

State University); Bruce Michelson (University of Illinois at

Urbana-Champaign); Megan Morton (Purdue University);

Steven Muhlberger (Nipissing University); Lori Muntz (Iowa

Wesleyan College); Ann Murphy (Assumption College); Sarah

Perrault (University of Nevada, Reno); Christine Pipitone-

Herron (Raritan Valley Community College); David Samper

(University of Oklahoma); Rose Shapiro (Fontbonne Univer-

sity); Jennifer Stewart (Indiana University–Purdue University

Fort Wayne); Sandra Stollman (Broward College); Linda Sturtz

(Beloit College); Mark Sutton (Kean University); Tobin von

der Nuell (University of Colorado at Boulder); Brody Waybrant

(Bay Mills Community College); Gina Weaver (Southern

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321

Acknowledgments

Nazarene University); Amy Whitson (Missouri State Univer-

sity); Susan Wright (Montclair State University).

Thanks also to those who reviewed the manuscript for the

original version of “They Say”; their suggestions contributed

enormously to this book: Alan Ainsworth (Houston Com-

munity College); Rise Axelrod (University of California,

Riverside); Bob Baron (Mesa Community College); David Bar-

tholomae (University of Pittsburgh); Diane Belcher (Georgia

State University); Michel De Benedictis (Miami Dade College);

Joseph Bizup (Boston University); Patricia Bizzell (College of

the Holy Cross); John Brereton (Harvard University); Richard

Bullock (Wright State University); Charles Cooper (University

of California, San Diego); Christine Cozzens (Agnes Scott Col-

lege); Sarah Duerden (Arizona State University); Russel Durst

(University of Cincinnati); Joseph Harris (Duke University);

Paul Heilker (Virginia Polytechnic Institute); Michael Hen-

nessy (Texas State University); Karen Lunsford (University of

California, Santa Barbara); Libby Miles (University of Rhode

Island); Mike Rose (University of California, Los Angeles);

William H. Smith (Weatherford College); Scott Stevens

(Western Washington University); Patricia Sullivan (Univer-

sity of Colorado); Pamela Wright (University of California, San

Diego); Daniel Zimmerman (Middlesex Community College).

Finally, a special thank you to David Bartholomae for sug-

gesting the phrase that became the subtitle of this book.

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323

GERALD GRAFF, a professor of English and Education at the Uni-

versity of Illinois at Chicago and the 2008 President of the Modern

Language Association of America, has had a major impact on teachers

through such books as Professing Literature: An Institutional History,

Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conﬂ icts Can Revitalize

American Education, and, most recently, Clueless in Academe: How

Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind. The new Common Core State

Standards for K–12 cite his work on the importance of argument

literacy for college and career readiness. CATHY BIRKENSTEIN, a

lecturer at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has published essays

on writing, most recently in College English, and, with Gerald, in The

Chronicle of Higher Education, Academe, and College Composition and

Communication. She and Gerald have given over a hundred lectures

and workshops at colleges, conferences, and high schools—and are at

present working on a book contending that our currently confusing

school and college curriculum needs to be clariﬁ ed by making the

practice of argument the common thread across all disciplines.

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