Do Academics Really Write This Way? A Corpus Investigation of Moves and Templates in "They Say I Say"

Since its first edition, Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein's writing textbook, "They Say I Say" The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing (henceforth TSIS) has inspired familiar debates among writing professionals. Recurring lines of questioning have included the following: whether it is possible to teach academic discourse in first year writing and, if so, whether it is efficacious or ethical to do so; whether there is such a thing as (an) academic discourse in the first place and, if so, whether an explicit or implicit instructional approach to teaching discourse conventions or strategies is preferable; and, stepping just a bit into Sapir Whorf territory, whether or not explicitly teaching wordings, specifically in the form of templates, can assist students to develop new lines of reasoning or "complexity" in thinking (e.g. Benay; Birkenstein and Graff; Edlund).For readers unfamiliar with TSIS, its stated purpose is "to demystify academic writing by isolating its basic moves" (Graff and Birkenstein xvi) Examples of moves the authors explore are entertaining objections and making concessions while still standing your ground, to name just two. Such moves are positioned by the authors as useful concepts for acquainting student writers with a view of academic argumentation as social and dialogic. Students are encouraged to move toward and defend their stances "I Say" after first carefully reviewing others' views " They Say" More controversially, the authors also offer sentence level formulas, or templates, for realizing the moves. For instance, to guide students toward making concessions, the authors offer templates like, "Although I grant that_____, I still maintain that_____" and "While it is true that_____, it does not necessarily follow that_____" (89) Such templates, according to the authors, "might have the potential to open up and clarify academic conversation" for many students (xviii).My starting point for this essay is that the reviews of this textbook are important as much for the questions they do not raise as for the ones they do, and the silences speak volumes about the status of language in composition and rhetorical  But first, to offer a brief recap of the critical reception, the positive reviews have endorsed the template approach, agreeing with Graff and Birkenstein that language level explicitness is needed, especially for students who struggle to "pick up" valued discursive moves on their own. According to Marna Broekhoff, templates "provide accessible means of entering academic debates" (135) The critical reviews, in contrast, have argued that the textbook offers a reductive, formalistic, and decontextualized view of academic writing. For some, its very appearance points to a "troublesome persistence of formalism" in the field (Lynch Biniek) and, by reducing argumentation down to a two part dialogue, they say and I say, it "encourage[s] oversimplification and deliberate ignorance of the complexity of a given conversation" (Arthur and Case Halferty 3) Arguably the most powerful critiques are those pointing to context (see, e.g. Hollrah and Farmer) According to this line of critique, the moves writers make, or their linguistic realizations, will vary in subtle and important ways depending on genre, (sub)disciplinary epistemologies, and writers' own individual goals.2 Accordingly, beginning with formulaic structures and sentence level wordings in the classroom is putting the cart before the horse, with the likely result that students become so focused on forms that they fail to grasp the complex rhetorical motives that gave shape to the forms.In contrast to these lively lines of debate, there has been silence in discussions of TSIS on this empirical question: Do academics really write this way?3 Do the moves and templates presented in the textbook accurately reflect patterns of language use in written academic discourses, as revealed through analysis of academic writing?