In my research writing class, I draw a bit on the textbook They Say / I Say* by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, especially when it comes to teaching students how to respond to sources. My main textbook for that course is Craft of Research, but I find it doesn't say a lot about how to read sources, synthesize sources, and come up with your own argument. TS/IS, awkward title aside, has parts where it does a good job of both highlighting 1) what your sources are doing, and 2) how you might do it too. (Students, I think, often conceptualize what they're doing as distinct from their sources, not as part of it.)
I don't teach the whole book, but I do assign chapters 1-2, 4-5, and 14. The other day (as of this writing; I'm typing this up a couple weeks in advance) I was teaching chapters 4-5. These cover the "three ways" of responding to sources and how to distinguish what they say from what you say.
As someone who was an English ed major in college and then has taught writing for eighteen years now, I have read a lot of writing textbooks in my time. Most of the time I don't like them. What I don't like is when they seem to describe something alien to me and my process. If I can't identify what they discuss with my own writing process, how can I go on to recommend that my students do it in their own process? (I still remember this book I hated as an undergraduate called Writing and Being.) So what I look out for in writing textbooks is when they describe something I already do, but in putting a name on it, help me to understand it better. I feel like no textbook I have ever read is consistently good in this regard, but you can piece together a solid writing curriculum out of various bits and pieces of Booth et al.'s Craft of Research, Rosenwasser and Stephen's Writing Analytically, Harris's Rewriting, and TS/IS.
One of the parts that really resonated for me in TS/IS is the chapters I'm talking about here, when they discuss how to 1) recognize when sources are agreeing and disagreeing with each other, and 2) how to do that yourself. Graff and Birkenstein love templates, their whole deal is both telling you the intellectual moves that academic writing typically makes and giving you specific words to accomplish it with. I didn't read TS/IS until after I wrote it... but my article on Wilkie Collins's Heart and Science uses their templates several times! (For example, their "However... / ...overlooks" template: "However, this focus on the pleasures of the interior self overlooks Mrs. Gallilee’s consistent concern with her own social standing, especially display of success.") Not because I actually used their templates, but because their templates offer very clear ways to disagree with sources that I arrived at independently.
So when I teach these chapters, I show students some examples from my own work and ask them if the writer (whoever he is) is agreeing or disagreeing with the sources. Then I reveal that 1) I wrote it all, and 2) before I ever read TS/IS, trying to make the point that this is what they should do because this is simply what writers do.
Anyway, all of this is to set up me teaching the chapters this time, this semester. I had just showed how the examples I was giving were from own work and encouraged the students to be doing this themselves.
One of my students raises his hand: "So back at the beginning of the semester, you told us all that one of the things you didn't like about AI was how it makes everything sound the same, but now you're all telling us to write the same way?" I think you could read it as confrontational or as a "gotcha" moment now that I type it out, but it didn't sound that way, it sounded like genuine curiosity about a perceived contradiction.
I often think students don't ask enough questions about why we instructors do what we do. I for one am generally happen to explain my rationales, and I try to do so in class, but I can't explain everything (I am already something of an overexplainer I feel), but then you get comments on your evals that indicate students don't understand that you had very good reasons for something, or any reasons at all. So I appreciated this question even as it knocked me for a bit of a loop. Why did I decry the sameness of LLM-generated writing even as I asked my students to use similar wording in their own writing? Could I adopt a consistent answer?
What I said is that actually I am not a huge fan of templates—there's a reason I assign just a couple chapters of TS/IS and not the whole book. I find them constrictive; I struggle with the same thing when it comes to providing examples in class. I know any writer benefits from looking at how other people have done something, but it also means that students will often mimic the thing you give them too much. What I try to teach with examples—and with templates, when I give them—is the underlying intellectual task. I actually am not a big fan of mimicking exact wording, it's more that I want them to do a certain thing, and following a template is a possible way to accomplish it... but there might be others!
That seemed to satisfy him. It was a striking moment; one always wonders how much students are actually thinking about what you say, but it seemed like he actually was!
* Officially "They Say / I Say" for some reason, but that looks stupid. If there are going to be quotation marks in the title, surely "They Say"/"I Say" would be better.
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