They Say I Say Summary

They say, I Say, a book written by Graff and Birkenstein, constructs a writing technique for analytical papers for writers. It has lessons on how to express the ideas of other writers, the “They say”, and an author’s personal ideals/thoughts, the “I say”. This is achieved by creating templates for organization such as: “X apparently assumes that ____ (Graff and Birkenstein 25)-a they say example- in short lessons discussed in each chapter. The templates in this book strives to enhance the writing of novices so their essays are less bland and have a higher level of complexity; however, these templates could be possibly detrimental to more experience writers. This book gives templates for writers to use to make their writing more complex and …show more content…
While the templates are great to begin to make writing more entertaining, complex, and coherent, they only take writing to a couple levels above that of a true beginner’s. Higher level writing class and more experienced writers would be fools to continue using templates in their writing. Ana Kedves agrees that They Say, I Say is not for “experienced academic writers won’t find it particularly exciting or helpful, but those just starting to work their way about literature in the field would benefit from having a look.” It is more of a learning tool. Templates are just not a great option for experienced writers. It will take away from originality, which is essential for writing at higher levels. When papers and essays emulate many others, creditability can be …show more content…
All the lessons written about and taught in the book were taught to me by my junior year of high school language arts teacher. That class established as a beginner crash course for analytical writing. The hope was to prepare students for writing and reading analytically at a higher level; ultimately, students were to use these lessons later on as a basis for college essays that would be written in the future. I recall my teacher specifically saying that as we gained experience, these lessons would evolve to become our outlines. We would later draft and re-draft essays in more complex and original methods. In essence, when leaving our class and her lessons, we would be equipped to begin a writing career that would only get progressively superior to our first

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