Because I teach writing, and because my students publish some of their writing to the Internet, I’ve been thinking about the differences between blogging effectively, and simply writing online. This is a question that Bud Hunt explored recently, and he sees hypertext links as the essential difference. But I’m sure that Bud would agree there’s more to blogging than just adding links to our writing. Yes, linking matters in important ways. Mainly, it allows us to extend a conversation by connecting one source with another (like I’m doing here, now). Doing that requires us to make judgments about how texts are related, and to take a position relative to one or another. But that doesn’t happen just from the linking. The linking, as I see it, facilitates criticism.

It may seem obvious, but to contribute to a conversation, the writer should have something more to say. This is a point that Gerald Graff and Kathy Birkenstein make in a little book that’s been called “the Strunk and White of academic writing [pdf review]. The book is a how-to for academic writing, making the point that there are certain fundamental “moves” that a writer needs to make in order to interest anyone in what they have to say. Our writing, the authors argue, has to be connected to a larger conversation, and it is up to us to frame the discussion for our readers so they can see our point of view relative to someone else’s. “Otherwise,” they point out, “what you’re saying might be clear, but why you’re saying it won’t be.” Here is a lecture they gave on the material covered in the first chapter of the book [pdf sample chapter].

What sets this book apart from other writing manuals is that it provides dozens of templates for the writing conventions that writers use to frame their arguments. It seems contradictory to offer cookbook recipes for critical thinking, but after looking through the book, and considering the difficulty some students have with the concepts involved in summarizing and responding to texts, I think this book may have something valuable to offer writing teachers. The most basic form is the one that the title of the book is taken from: I say…. / They say…. I believe this is going to be a big help for my students, whose writing tends to be monologic and self-absorbed. They really don’t get commentary, which is one of the big difficulties I’ve run into trying to help them learn to blog about their online learning. A side-benefit may be that students, once they learn to spot these discourse patterns in other people’s writing, will be become more critical readers. With practice.

Graff and Birkenstein feel that it isn’t enough to say true things that conform to a thesis statement, and support it with evidence, which is how the essay form is conventionally taught. They remind us that in the real world, people don’t usually express themselves without some provocation. Our writing is improved, they say, when we include the voices of the provocateurs in what we have to say. Blogging, like academic writing, is a conversation. Isn’t it?

I’m not alone with my frustrations as a writing teacher, I know. And from what Gerald Graff has to say about working with university level students, the problem isn’t necessarily that my students are too young to learn how to react meaningfully to text passages. Graff makes the case that the job of schools is to induct students into the intellectual world of academia. “If they don’t talk our talk or have a sense of what our issues are,” he asked, “then in what sense are they being educated?” He explains that all of the academic disciplines are mediated by the talk of scholars, and that the job of teachers is to help students learn how to participate in that discourse. He is dismayed at how few college students are prepared “to take part in the literate discourse of their culture about important issues.” They Say / I Say is part of his answer for the problem.

I believe that we should try to encourage this kind of writing and reading at every level, and I join Deborah Meier in contesting the idea that “academics” are beyond the reach of disadvantaged students. This book offers an approach for teaching what Will Richardson has called “connective writing.” I’m going to give it a whirl, and read some more of the book. I’ll get back to you on it when I have more to report.