[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. Continue reading »