intro and chapter 1 summary

In the intro to "They say I say" the authors introduce templates meant to help a writer in developing their organization skills. Writing is essential in society today and Birkenstein and Graff want to give writers a helpful guide in making his or her writing as successful and effective as possible. The templates are meant to just be guides. Trying to use them without extra information will result in an incoherent paper. That is why it is necessary to mention and describe your main point, or view, and to support it with your own information. Both authors believe that through these templates a writer is able to more easily express his or her views or opinions. While some people argue that templates hinder one's creative writing the authors believe the opposite to be true. All in all, they want to introduce the writer to new creative ideas of writing. What works for some may not work for all, but in my opinion the templates are very useful in helping me to organize my thoughts and ideas and put them into a coherent piece of writing. These templates offer something that I think is the most important thing to have in an essay. That would be structure. Structure is necessary in order to make a good piece of writing and through these templates creating structure is easily accessible.

Chapter 1 of "They say I say" focuses on what "they say". This means that in order to write an effective essay it is important to not only make your own point clear, but to also talk about what other people think on the matter. In this way you are connecting and comparing your own views with or against someone else's. This is what leads to your response. After summarizing what "they think", you are now able to make a response that is now more logical and meaningful. Birkenstein and Graff also want to help develop the writer's skills into a more advanced level. This is through eliminating the one sided writing which is commonly found in students papers. The question "so what' is important because you just don't want to state what other people feel on this matter, you also want to state your own opinion. However, it is important to not just state only your opinion without any reference. I agree with this type of writing. It is much more effective to your paper if you reference to what you are either agreeing or disagreeing with, than to just make a laundry list full of facts, as my history teacher used to say. There must be a balance between what "they say", and what "I say". Graff and Birkenstein make this clear in chapter 1, as it is an important recurring theme in all genres of writing.