Now it must first be stated that there are several things that Graff is not trying to do, at least as I see it. Graff is not interested in teaching writing in general. He goal for this text, and for composition courses at the university level, is based in the idea that argumentation is the foundation of the academic conversation, and so his text focuses exclusively on the give and take, dialectical texts generally (if not universally) required of academics. While he surely privileges academic writing and criticism in his approach, (Bartholomae) he explicitly quotes Elb0w on the importance of the "believing/doubting game." Very much a pragmatist whose own early dislike for reading and academic pursuits has - by his own admittance - shaped his thinking somewhat, (although neither as difficult nor as powerful as Elbow's or Murray's) Graff seems to worry very little about exactly how one arrives at his or her product, provided it is dialectical in nature, and takes a stance in the ongoing academic conversation around a given topic. There is no debate about whether Elbow's authentic self or Bartholomae's socially constructed individual is the "truer" vision of the student writer, for example. It seems one might freewrite and then add the argument templates to help shape the "mess" as one went through subsequent drafts, or begin immediately, after reading critical arguments, with filling in the templates as a generative exercise.
Instead, Graff focuses on giving the students the tools he considers essential to entering the academic conversation. To his mind, this means a rhetorical approach, focused on the basics of argumentation. To put these basics in front of the students in an immediately usable form Graff believes in employing templates that allow students to borrow generic phrasing to construct arguments by plugging their own information/research in the blank.
While some commenting on Graff's initial use of templates in Clueless in Academe were very critical (see Pedagogy Volume 5,Number 2, 2005), the issues raised seem to have been clearly addressed in They Say/I Say. For example, in her contribution to the roundtable, Ann Jurecic complains that by using templates Graff limits the life of the mind to "Where as X argues _____, I claim ___." She accuses him of presenting the life of the mind and the work of the academic as arguing primarily by staking a claim against another person.
Perhaps this is a fair impression from the earlier text, however, in They Say/I Say it becomes immediately clear that Graff is playing a much more complex game than Jurecic accuses him of. Instead of focusing only on staking a position in opposition to another critic (as he is accused of doing) he begins the text by making the point that one of the principal reasons for the "they say" half of the equation is to establish a context for one's paper, and a reason for the writing. As he points out, launching into your own position without framing it in terms of other possibilities leaves the audience wondering why the claim is being argued.
Furthermore, Graff continues from that point to focus on (in order) summarizing the views of others, quoting others, and then agreeing with others before he gets to "staking a position of opposition." In addition, the portion of these rhetorical moves that he considers the most advanced is not that of directly opposing, but what he calls "agreeing with a difference." Furthermore in this section of his text, Graff explicitly states the applicability of his templates to a paper in which one "weigh[s] a position's pros and cons rather than come out decisively either for or against." Here Graff argues for the They Say/I Say templates in a context that is explicitly not engaged in direct argument with someone else. Clearly this use of templates is far more complex and more thought out than some critics initially claimed.
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