[Note: The following is a modified from a posting I sent to the Teaching Composition discussion list earlier today. I’d been thinking about Graff and Birkenstein’s They Say, I Say from the perspective of memoria when someone posted a complaint about its use of templates.]

Hearing about the praise Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s They Say, I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing has been getting, I thought I’d give the book a look. My initial reaction to the formulaic approach of the book was one of unease. It’s premised upon the notion that academic writing can be reduced to formulas which we can use to enter into conversations with others. In other words, it seeks to teach academic writing through the use of templates. I put the book aside and started looking elsewhere for next semester. But there was someting about the book that kept nagging at me.

And then yesterday, as I was rereading some of Walter Ong’s discussions of the role of rhapsody in rhetoric–in particular, his reviews of Brian Vicker’s Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry and Samuel Howell’s Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric, and his article “Typographic Rhapsody: Ravisius Textor, Zwinger, and Shakespeare”–for my dissertation chapter on database technologies as compositional tools, I began to realize why I couldn’t just leave They Say, I Say alone. Maybe, I thought to myself, I’m assuming the templates are a form of Ramist method rather than a form of commonplace thinking, a contemporary approach to rhapsodizing.

So, armed with the theory and practice of memoria in the background of my thinking, and with both Ong’s and Carruthers’ discussions of rhapsodizing in chirographic and print cultures in the foreground, I reread Graff and Birkenstein’s Preface. In the section, “Okay, But Templates?”, they write:

The aim of the templates, then, is not to stifle critical thinking but to be direct with students about the key rhetorical moves that comprise it. […] 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 Renaissance studied rhetorical topoi or “commonplaces,” model passages and formulas that represented the different strategies available to public speakers. In many respects, our templates echo this classical rhetorical tradition of imitating established models. (XV)

There it was. Rather than take them at their word, I let my suspicion of the methodological tradition override my own thinking about reviving memoria. As I understand the argument G and B make in this book, and this understanding comes from more than just the passage I quote above, the idea behind They Say, I Say is to use the templates to interiorize the process of writing as a response to an ongoing discussion. The goal is not to use the templates verbatim as a form of rote recitation (iterata scentia), but to use them as a starting point from which to create one’s response. In short, the purpose of the templates is to provide a framework for rhapsodizing.

That framework, of course, is the beginning and not the end of the process, and from my skimming here and there through the book, Graff and Birkenstein seem to be aware of this (it could just be that I’m bringing too much of my own understanding of the commonplace tradition into my reading of their work). As one interiorizes this framework and the rhetorical consciousness it requires (issues such as but not limited to “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?”), one can use it inventively to analyze and meet the needs of particular rhetorical contexts. This assumption on my part seems to be bolstered by examples in the book which follow the formulas implicitly rather than explicitly, once again suggesting to me that the goal is not to use formulas by rote but to interiorize them and the noetic processes needed for their use so that the rhetor can concern herself or himself with the current rhetorical situation.

Foregrounding this use of the templates, from what I’ve seen in my skimming of the book, is largely left up to the instructor. G and B seem to introduce the idea, at least to this particular reader who is deeply enmeshed in a dissertation on the theory and practice of memory, but G and B don’t seem to dictate how this should be introduced in any programmatic way. And this is one of the facets I do like about the book: it seeks not to shape a course as so many FYC textbooks do, but, instead, it seeks to be integrated into a course. Unlike many course-in-a-book texts, They Say, I Say requires an instructor to approach the text rhetorically, to approach the course as a conversation into which the text is invited. I might be pushing this metaphor a bit too far, but I do think this flexibility of the text is one of its strengths.

The text does privilege a particular type of discourse, but it’s also short enough to integrate as a unit in a much broader course. But the more I think about it, the more I’m inclined to think that the book is more versatile than many of us (including myself) might give it credit for on first, second, or even third glance. G and B assert that the “they say, I say” formula governs much more than just academic writing and do offer a number of examples illustrating this claim. Wanting to come up with an example of a genre I’ve taught that wouldn’t be goverend by this formula, I quickly thought of the resume. If we assume that the “they say, I say” formula is intended to be used verbatim, to be memorized and repeated as acts of iterata scentia, then their formula does serve little purpose for resume writing.

However, if we assume that the goal in using the templates is an act of reminiscentia, what Albertus Magnus describes as recollection involving the power of discernment to consciously use that recollection, and what Aquinas defines as a “quasi-syllogistic” use of recollection according to one’s intentions, then we do find the “they say, I say” formula applying to resume writing: They (the people doing the hiring) say they are looking for these specific requirements, and I say (in the form of my resume and cover letter) that I meet those requirements and am a good fit for the position. In fact, if we think about it in this way, the “they say, I say” formula asks the applicant to not be formulaic in the writing of their resume (i.e., mass produce one resume to send out to all positions), but to tailor their resume for each and every position to which they apply.

I know it’s counter-intuitive for us to think of formulas as being rhetorical, but they can be, and for much of the history and practice of rhetoric they have been. That, rather than the (rote) memorization of speeches for oral delivery, was the purpose of memoria and the memory arts. This understanding of memoria asks us to approach They Say, I Say as a memory text, as a handbook for thinking (which is what the ars memoria were for) rather than as a substitute for thinking (which is what Ramus’ method turned memory into).