"They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing"
by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein

[Part of the]
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

WE CONTINUE TO BE THRILLED BY THE RECEPTION OF OUR BOOK, which has now sold over a million copies and is assigned in more than 1,500 (over half) the colleges and universities in the United States. We are also delighted that while the audience for our book in composition courses continues to grow, the book is increasingly being adopted in disciplines across the curriculum, confirming our view that the moves taught in the book are central to every academic discipline.

At the same time, we continue to adapt our approach to the specific ways the “they say / I say” moves are deployed in different disciplines. To that end, this edition adds a new chapter on writing about literature to the chapters already in the Second Edition on writing in the sciences and social sciences. In this new chapter, “Entering Conversations about Literature,” we suggest ways in which students and teachers can move beyond the type of essay that analyzes literary works in isolation from the conversations and debates about those works. One of our premises here is that writing about literature, as about any subject, gains in urgency, motivation, and engagement when the writer responds to the work not in a vacuum, but in conversation with other readers and critics.
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Even as we revised and added to “They Say/I Say,” our basic goal remains unchanged: to demystify academic writing and reading by identifying the key moves of persuasive argument and representing those moves in forms that students can put into practice. We hope this Third Edition will get us even closer to these goals, equipping students with the writing skills they need to enter the academic world and beyond.

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GERALD GRAFF, a professor of English and Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the 2008 President of the Modern Language Association of America, has had a major impact on teachers through such books as Professing Literature: An Institutional History, Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education, and, most recently, Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind. The new Common Core State Standards for K-12 cite his work on the importance of argument literacy for college and career readiness. CATHY BIRKENSTEIN, a lecturer at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has published essays on writing, most recently in College English, and, with Gerald, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Academe, and College Composition and Communication. She and Gerald have given over a hundred lectures and workshops at colleges, conferences, and high schools—and are at present working on a book contending that our currently confusing school and college curriculum needs to be clarified by making the practice of argument the common thread across all disciplines.

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