They Say, I Say: Part 2

In Chapter 4 of They Say, I Say, Graff and Birkenstein teach us how to respond to a writers view point in a respectful and proper way. Most of us tend to struggle with how to respond to work of a writer especially when we feel we don’t know enough about it. Graff and Birkenstein assure us that ” What these students come to realize is that good arguments are based not on knowledge that only a special class of experts has access to, but on everyday habits of mind that can be isolated, identified, and used by almost anyone.” This quote from the passage explains to us that by simply living our own life, we have enough content to create for our own writing and responses. From disagreeing or agreeing with a writers work, Graff and Birkenstein show us how to correctly do just that.

Before reading this chapter I was not aware of all the different type of templates that you could use to respond to a writer. The main thing that might be a struggle for me still is not making my readers confused when I am undecided with an opinion. Graff and Birkenstein discuss it in the text but I feel as if it might be a little more complicated when you’re having to actually go through it.

During Chapter 5, we are shown how to make a clear view on whose voice is being expressed in our writing. To avoid confusion to our audience, we are taught what to do and what not to do. This chapter also shows us how to use different templates to start our writing. The common phrase we have all heard is not to use ‘I’, so Graff and Birkenstein explain to us that sometimes it is okay to use it or other substitutes for “I” in our writing. It is expressed to make our writing clear enough on who is saying what and how not to confuse our reader.

For this chapter I learned different ways on how to make sure our voice or another writers voice is heard correctly. I didn’t realize how confusing it could be to our readers when we word our sentences a certain way. The templates in each chapter are going to come in handy whenever we have a paper to write in class

In Chapter 6, Graff and Birkenstein explain to us how to take criticism of our writing as a useful tool. It is important to be able to hear someone else’s criticism and use it to improve our writing and not let it doubt our talent. Criticism can also come along even when we edit our writing hundreds of times to make it as perfect as possible. We need to be able to confidently take that criticism and know that what we wrote is good enough. In some aspects, we can use the criticism we know were going to receive in our paragraphs. Graff and Birkenstein show us many examples on how to word our sentences the correct way to address our readers concern/criticism.

During this chapter I wasn’t aware of how useful it would be to address our audience’s concerns in our writing. It will definitely come in handy when writing my future essays. I actually really enjoyed reading all the advice that Graff and Birkenstein give to their readers.

Chapter 7 shows us how to properly get our point across in our writing. We don’t want our readers to read our work and question what in the world we were even talking about. On top of that we don’t want them to say “who cares”. In the templates given to us it allows us to show our readers why they should care and how we can bring our point across as clear as possible. It’s important to get our readers to care about what we are writing about and make them read without falling asleep.

In this chapter I found the advice of how to NOT keep our readers confused and bored very helpful. I personally sometimes struggle with getting my writing to flow with each sentence. It’s something I work on with each writing assignment and hope to really grab my readers attentions with the advice given from Graff and Birkenstein.