Tag: Graff and Birkenstein

Chapter 10 of “They Say/I Say”
• Author Background
o Authors Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein
o Their audience is anyone looking to improve their own academic writing skills or are looking to teach others how to right
o 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
• Chapter 10 “The Art of Metacommentary”
o Purpose of chapter is to emphasis the importance of explaining you points father after you make them
o Focuses on explaining what metacommentay is and why it is useful
• What is Metacommentary
o It is a way of furthering your points to tell your readers how they should or should not be viewing your information
o Explains the meaning of your big point or main text
o Use it to backup claims and explicitly tell the reader how to interpret the information they were just given
o Title and subtitles are some of the most important metacommentary that gets overlooked very often
• Why do we need it?
o Even if your main text is very clear, the audience can still take it the wrong way
 You could lose the reader in a complex argument that needs more explanation
 Readers could miss the big picture
 Readers could not understand the significance
o If your paper needs to be longer, it adds length and depth
o Could help you think of more ideas and better points hen trying to explain something further
 Makes you analyze your topic more and see new angles
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• 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