Chapter 7 TSIS Reading Notes

• Chapter 7 of “They Say/I Say”
• Authors Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein
• Their audience is anyone looking to improve their own academic writing skills or are looking to teach others how to right
• The purpose of the whole book is to give everyone equal opportunity to be able to write good quality texts even if they don’t intuitively know how.
• The purpose of this chapter is to tell why it is important to tell the audience why you are writing about the subject and how it applies to (“so what” and “who cares”)
• This chapter focuses on various moves and templates to use in order to explain to the reader why your topic is significant
• Readers need to know why they should care
• Even if you think your reasons are obvious, you should explain why anyway
• A big problem of speakers are that they don’t address the question of why their argument matters and then loses the interest of their audience because it lacks relevance
• “who cares”: asks you to identify a person or group that cares about what you are saying
• “so what”: asks about real-world applications and consequences to give it relevance
• Best way to show larger role your claims make is to relate it to something you know the audience already cares about
• Very important to just be explicit about it, get to the point