I just finished reading They Say, I Say: The Moves That Matter in Amademic Writing by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein. I really appreciate the book’s ability to de-mystify some of the things that happen in academic writing, both for first-year students who would read this (we’re starting to use it at OSU for first-year composition) and for me. It’s a pretty straighforward book. Like other possible critics, I wonder if it’s a little too “here are the tools to fix your writing” or “drop in a few of these tricks and you’re writing will be fine.” But overall I found the book pretty useful, and I wish I had had it last year when I taught Writing 121 because it definitely makes some things clear, like connecting sentences and paragraphs, or working from others’ ideas. This book has my endorsement (though I still feel that academic writing does too much of the work for the reader: why can’t a reader make connections on his/her/hir own? what happened to more artistic writing?). I wish, however, that Graff and Birkenstein had bothered to cite sources using MLA, 1) as a model for students, and 2) so that I can go back to their sources.
Graff, Gerald, and Cathy Birkenstein. They Say, I Say: Moves That Matter in Academic Writing.New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.
