50 pages • 1 hour read
Gerald Graff, Cathy BirkensteinThey Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing
Nonfiction | Reference/Text Book | Adult | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein (The Authors)
Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein coauthored this book. They are a married pair. Both teach English at the college level. They focus on teaching writing, composition, and communication. Each has published scholarly writing on the subject, both separately and as coauthors. Along with They Say/I Say, Graff and Birkenstein have also cowritten articles for a variety of publications including The Chronicle of Higher Education (a periodical focusing on American colleges and universities) and College Composition and Communication (a scholarly journal published by the association of the same name).
Gerald Graff holds a PhD in English and American literature from Stanford University, which he received in the early 1960s. He has taught at Northeastern University and the University of Chicago and is a professor of English and education at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). While his earliest academic work focuses on literary analysis, his later work (for which he is best known) focuses on pedagogy. Graff is also a cofounder of UIC’s Master of Arts Program in the Humanities (MAPH) and was president of the Modern Language Association in 2008.
Cathy Birkenstein is a lecturer in English at UIC, where she regularly coteaches courses with Graff. She holds a PhD in American literature. Along with Graff and Les Lynn, a veteran public school teacher in the Chicago area, Birkenstein is a founding adviser of and consultant to Argument-Centered Education (ACE), a coalition of Chicago educators who advocate for centering debate and rhetoric in local public-school curricula.
Graff and Birkenstein occupy a joint role in They Say/I Say. Neither Graff nor Birkenstein ever distinguishes one author from the other; neither author ever steps forward to present an individualized aside or a unique position.
Instead, every statement Graff and Birkenstein make in They Say/I Say is the product of implicit consensus. When they introduce professional anecdotes to help make their points, they refer only to classes “we” have taught, students “we” have worked with, events “we” have attended, and “our” work. While these authors establish a personable and relaxed tone in their writing, they never cross into the outright personal. The reader is not made aware of Graff and Birkenstein’s personal relationship outside of scant references to classes they taught together. This balance of casual and friendly language with relatively little personal information about the authors allows Graff and Birkenstein to explain their fairly technical subject matter in a way that is entertaining without being overly complicated by tangents.
Christopher Gillen (Contributor)
Christopher Gillen is a professor of biology at Kenyon College and the faculty director of the Kenyon Institute in Biomedical and Scientific Writing. As a contributor to They Say/I Say, Gillen applies Graff and Birkenstein’s approach to writing in general to scientific writing in particular. The introduction of an expert—not just in writing, but in science writing (and science in general)—who concurs with Graff and Birkenstein lends them credibility as resources, especially for students writing outside of the humanities. Gillen also provides some unique insight into the way scientific papers are structured, why they are structured that way, and how to use that structure to one’s own rhetorical advantage.
Erin Ackerman (Contributor)
Erin Ackerman is Social Sciences Librarian and adjunct professor in the political science department at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ). She holds a PhD in political science from Johns Hopkins University and a Master of Library Information Science (MLIS) degree from Rutgers University.
Like Gillen, Ackerman repurposes Graff and Birkenstein’s approach to writing in general for social science writing in particular. Like Gillen, Ackerman bolsters the credibility of the main authors of the book both through her own expertise in her field and her ready adaptation of Graff and Birkenstein’s principles of writing to it. She also discusses the structure of social science papers, giving particular attention to the purpose of format of literature reviews, which are absent from Gillen’s chapter. Just as her chapter supplements Gillen’s, so, too, both of their chapters supplement Graff and Birkenstein’s book. Moreover, the inclusion of these experts from either side of the science spectrum not only introduces students to their cultural differences and similarities, but also caters to budding specialists in either field.
