Published Fall/Winter 2007
 
Templates, Moves, Rules of Thumb
(on Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein's They Say, I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing [New York: Norton, 2006])
by Matt Hollrah and Frank Farmer | ns 69
In one of his fascinating clinical tales, Oliver Sacks tells us of the strange case of Dr. P., a music professor referred to Sacks because Dr. P. had presented an array of odd visual symptoms. It seems that Dr. P. had difficulty recognizing his own students and friends, was sometimes seen patting the tops of fire hydrants, and once, grasping the head of his wife, mistook her for a hat. Sacks, having eliminated problems with visual acuity, put Dr. P. through a series of neurological tests, none of which indicated what might be the source of Dr. P.'s condition. At a loss for a diagnosis or treatment, Sacks advised Dr. P. to continue to enjoy his otherwise rich and happy life, making use of the compensating strategies he had learned to help him get by.
In a postscript to this tale, Sacks tells his readers that it was only later that he learned the nature of his patient's condition. Dr. P., it seems, had suffered from a very rare neurological disorder known as prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces. Early research indicated that a very particular kind of damage to the brain, typically caused by stroke or trauma, resulted in prosopagnosia. Looking into the then-current studies on "face blindness," Sacks mentions the groundbreaking work of Antonio Damasio, whose research endeavored to construct a model for the processes of face recognition. Damasio suggested that the prosopagnosiac could not access what Damasio called "templates," patterns of contextual memory that allow normal human beings to recognize those others whom they meet and know from everyday experience.
Damasio's choice of the term template, we think, is remarkable. In conventional usage, a template is simply a fixed pattern, a static form, seemingly acontextual and universal in its application. But for Damasio, a template is a dynamic form that brings together associated past memories, that transforms itself according to experiences with new and familiar faces, and that is quite fluid in its development within and throughout our personal histories. Without access to these templates, however, prosopagnosiac sufferers must resort to scanning the faces of others for abstract markers (e.g., scars, dimples, bushy eyebrows, etc.), "data" that will allow them to identify the face in front of them. As Sacks said of Dr. P., what his patient no longer possessed was the ability to behold the face of another. And the act of beholding another cannot occur without some recoverable awareness, some recognition founded upon our contextual memory, or what Damasio calls templates.
Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein's They Say, I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing also posits the value of templates, but templates of a very different sort. The book is a slim writing guide (less than two hundred pages) for writing students, focusing on the key formal patterns or "moves" most often made in academic arguments. These moves take the form of templates, understood here as preexisting elements, staples of academic writing. Here is an example of a template that Graff and Birkenstein suggest academics use to open an ongoing debate:
In discussions of X, one controversial issue has been__________. On the one hand, __________ argues __________. On the other hand, __________ contends __________. Others even maintain __________. My own view is __________. (24)
The book is organized around these versions of fill-in-the-blanks. Graff and Birkenstein thus offer templates for organizing what sources say, for summarizing, for agreeing and disagreeing, even templates for classroom discussion, as in the following: "Though Sheila and Ryan seem to be at odds about __________, they may actually not be all that far apart" (133).
The authors are keenly aware that the use of templates as one solution to the complex problem of teaching written argument will seem oversimplified to many teachers and scholars. They admit early on in the book that some teachers of writing "may object that such formulaic devices represent a return to prescriptive forms of instruction that encourage passive learning or lead students to put their writing on automatic pilot" (xiv, xv). Ultimately, however, they reject this argument on the grounds that "many students will never learn on their own to make the key intellectual moves that our templates represent" (xv). In other words, students who come to college without having already acquired knowledge of academic discourse are unlikely to do so once in college without significant help. To acquaint them with our ways, this book aims not only to show students how to write arguments, but to make explicit the commonplaces of persuasive writing.
Anyone the least bit familiar with classical rhetoric will immediately recognize trace evidence of Aristotle's DNA all over this manuscript. The notion of a stock set of discursive moves, a repository or inventory available to be drawn upon and applied in various rhetorical situations is, of course, one of the oldest ideas about argumentation that the West has produced. In fact, Graff and Birkenstein mention the classical tradition for partial justification of their templates. As they themselves remind us, "Public orators from ancient Greece and Rome through the European Renaissance studied rhetorical topoi or 'commonplaces,' model passages and formulas that represented the different strategies available to public speakers. In many respects, our templates echo this classical rhetorical tradition of imitating established models" (xv). Anticipating objections, then, to the template model as formulaic and limiting, they answer (at least partially) with an appeal to this longstanding tradition and the idea that students today are prevented from fully participating in academic discourse by not knowing how to imitate what academics do. Learning what kinds of frames academic writers use to introduce quotations or concede a point will help students write better arguments, in their view, than will teaching students to identify errors in logic or to organize an argument inductively or deductively. While Graff and Birkenstein don't claim these aspects of argumentation are unimportant, they do claim that the templates provide a less abstract and more immediately applicable way to begin writing arguments.
But one problem that emerges here is the same problem that some contemporary rhetoricians have with Aristotle. How can the topoi be universal and specific at the same time? Must every rhetorical situation be required simply to surrender its particularities to the workings of already-established forms? Apparently so. For templates to be effective, it would seem that arguments must appear pretty much the same at all times and in all rhetorical situations. But we know that legal arguments can assume different shapes than scientific or political ones, and that what counts as evidence in one context or discipline might be considered to be irrelevant in another. And surely if a disputant must be able to read inferences in order to communicate faithfully what "they say," then we begin to encounter the limits of templates. As a matter of fact, no discussion of how to make inferences from particular pieces of evidence is provided here. But, again, this isn't that sort of book: it's interested in moves, not what gets moved. To determine what gets moved, we have to identify why templates are necessary in the first place, the reasons we need them at all.
One guiding assumption of this book is that academic arguments, and persuasive writing in general, are best understood as instances of wider, ongoing conversations. The majority of templates are thus related to situating an "I" in relationship to some "they," hence the title of the book. With the possible exception of three short readings appended to their discussion of templates, however, They Say, I Say does not attempt to provide those conversations for students. This exclusion has the odd effect of diminishing the significance of all such conversations, rendering them at best as pretexts, motivations (or maybe, if one is nostalgic in a formalist sort of way, devices) for the deployment of the obviously more important templates.
This leaves us with some uneasy questions about those unknown conversations. Are they ultimately irrelevant, except for their functional relationship to templates? Is one conversation as good as any other? Does the quality of a motivating conversation in any way determine the quality of the student's templates? Can templates be arbitrarily applied? We must also ask at this point, how will filling in the blanks of the templates—imitating academic commonplaces—help students participate in the larger conversations of a discipline if students, especially first-year students, don't know what to fill in the blanks with? Can the blanks be filled in with anything? For example, what if one filled in the aforementioned template in the following way?
In discussions of alcohol, one controversial issue has been at what age should it be allowed to be consumed. On the one hand, my friend Mike argues that this is a free country. On the other hand, Wikipedia contends that alcohol kills brain cells. Others even maintain that alcohol isn't that bad for you. My own view is that I should be able to drink it.
Or what about this one?
In discussions of flatulence, one controversial issue has been doing it in public. On the one hand, Ben Franklin argues to "fart proudly." On the other hand, society contends that it is rude. Others even maintain that holding in gas is bad for one's health. My own view is let 'er rip.
We have a hard time imagining the teacher who would be satisfied with either of these templates. Unfortunately, we do not have a hard time imagining students who would turn in either as a response to an assignment that asks them to position themselves within an ongoing conversation of their choosing—a requirement that we think might expose a very intimate relationship between the quality of our students' templates and the quality of the conversations assumed to engender those templates.
In his appended essay, "Hidden Intellectualism," Graff suggests that the varied interests our students bring with them can serve as starting points in learning academic habits of inquiry. "Real intellectuals," Graff says, are able to "turn any subject, however lightweight, into grist for their mills" (143). Therefore, if we invite our students to see their own interests "through academic eyes," then the academy may not seem as remote and foreign to them, and they may learn to value their own experience in a different way (147). But what does this mean, "through academic eyes"? Graff mentions "thoughtful questions" (143) and asking students "to think….in a reflective, analytical way…of what is going on in the wider culture" (148). He does not mention templates, however, as a method for achieving this depth of awareness.
If, as we suggested, this text is more interested in moves than in what gets moved, it is also fair to observe that it is not especially interested in who moves what where, for what purposes, and within what contexts. Our concern here—an admittedly rhetorical concern—derives not merely from the traditional form-content questions that Graff and Birkenstein revive (unintentionally, it seems), but also from the form-context questions that their text implies as well. The most crucial of these questions is the most obvious one: Where, in fact, do our students find the contexts within which these templates can do their work? Again, the immediate and obvious answer is from conversations they join.
But are there other contexts that might have a determining effect on the kinds of templates that academic disputants might use? We have already noted that arguments take different forms within the various disciplines. But might we not ask if arguments assume culturally-specific forms as well, and that if this is so, templates might differ from culture to culture too? Certainly, recent work in cultural rhetorics suggests that this may indeed be the case—as evidenced, for example, by scholarship on feminist enthymemes, Japanese enthymemes, hip-hop enthymemes, and so on. And what of historical, not to mention institutional, forms of argument? Are we truly certain that the templates of, say, the barroom are the same templates of the writing classroom? Not to belabor an obvious point, but will the presumed universalism of Graff and Birkenstein's templates hold up? And does the value of this text require that it must?
Even though the book's primary audience is first-year college students, it will be writing teachers, textbook selection committees, and writing program administrators who largely determine whether this text makes it into the classrooms of those same students. Composition scholars, however, may be understandably more than a little skittish about a textbook so wholly devoted to the teaching of discursive forms. And why might that be? Having forged a hard-won disciplinary identity, in large part by successfully repudiating the traditional formalisms of the past (e.g., five-paragraph themes, grammar drills, modes of discourse assignments, sentence diagramming, etc.), the modern composition specialist may be hesitant to embrace a text that offers yet more forms to teach to our students. For those trained in composition studies, this will seem like a throwback to more benighted days when the teaching of writing was nothing but the teaching of standard forms.
But we think composition teachers would be unwise to overlook the value of this little book. For in our discipline's reaction against the formalisms of the past, we are sometimes led to deny that forms exist at all, happily content that students will somehow acquire academic forms on their own. Or we hope that somehow, perhaps by continued immersion in academic culture, students will get the hang of what it is we do. Graff and Birkenstein do not share this faith, and thus believe that teachers have an active role in conveying the standard templates of academic argument to students who have little or no experience in their use.
Despite some of our reservations outlined above, we think that They Say, I Say can be a valuable text for the first-year classroom. We suggest that teachers interested in using this text would be wise to acquaint themselves (if they have not already done so) with Graff's previous work, especially Clueless in Academe. We advise this preparatory move because They Say, I Say embodies many of the ideas discussed in Clueless, but the latter offers a much more in-depth discussion and rationale for the pedagogical strategies presented in the text reviewed here. We would also recommend that They Say, I Say serve as a companion volume to one of the many good rhetoric readers available on the current market, especially those with a pronounced conversational emphasis. For these templates to work, students must have conversations within which to locate themselves. Short of a required reader, instructors may, of course, select their own readings (hence, their own conversations), or, following Graff's autobiographical lead, they might choose instead to help students refine and make use of the conversations that already engage them when they enter our classrooms.
But our strongest recommendation is reserved for how teachers present templates to their students. We believe that an indiscriminate, mechanical, unreflective application of these templates would be wrongheaded and misinformed. Students will only benefit from these templates if their teachers are imaginative, strategic, and perhaps even a little cunning in their classroom use of such forms. We are reminded here of Stanley Fish's distinction between rules and rules of thumb, and we therefore suggest templates be best understood as examples of the latter. In fact, Graff and Birkenstein seem to recommend much the same when they advise their readers that "the templates offered here are learning tools to get you started, not structures set in stone" (11). If students are to view templates as learning tools or rules of thumb, it will be largely because of the efforts of teachers who are aware that how we teachers understand templates is absolutely crucial to how our students utilize them.
Though working in an entirely different context, we think Antonio Damasio, in his research on prosopagnosia, basically got it right. Templates, whether of the mind or of the word, ought not to be regarded as fixed forms, immutable, universal, free from all contingencies and determinants. Templates must rather be understood as dynamic and situated, thoroughly imbricated in the contexts of their usage. If teachers can bring this larger understanding to bear on their use of argumentative templates, if they see templates as inseparable from the conversations that provoke them, if they are flexible and savvy in their classroom presentation of templates, then we highly recommend They Say, I Say. In the hands of knowledgeable teachers, this text will prove to be enormously useful for our students. But, in our opinion, it will be taught best by those teachers who have an understanding of the difficult and sometimes controversial issues that it raises. It is a text that should be—or rather, must be—simultaneously worked with and worked against. It offers plenty of opportunities for the resourceful teacher to do both.
Works Cited
Damasio, Antonio. "Review of Research on Prosopagnosia." Fields of Writing: Readings Across the Disciplines. Ed. Nancy Comley, et al. 2nd. Ed. New York: St. Martin's P, 1987. 525-33.
Fish, Stanley. "Consequences." Critical Inquiry 11 (March 1985): 433-58.
Graff, Gerald. Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind. New Haven: Yale UP, 2003.
Sacks, Oliver. "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat." The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales. New York: Harper & Row, 1987. 8-22.
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