They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing

This chapter explains how to connect “all the parts” of a piece of writing, whether they are large-scale ideas or individual phrases. Graff and Birkenstein open by describing a student named Bill, who wrote short, choppy sentences such as “Spot is a good dog. He has fleas” (105). They go on to explain the effect (the “so what?”):

And yet Bill did focus well on his subjects. When he mentioned Spot the dog (or Plato, or any other topic) in one sentence, we could count on Spot (or Plato) being the topic of the following sentence as well. This was not the case with some of Bill’s classmates, who sometimes changed topic from sentence to sentence or even from clause to clause within a single sentence. But because Bill neglected to mark his connections, his writing was as frustrating to read as theirs. In all these cases, we had to struggle to figure out on our own how the sentences and paragraphs connected or failed to connect with one another (106).

The authors add that the problem of inadequately “tying things together” can be resolved by “gestur[ing] back” to prior ideas or ideas that are about to be mentioned.

Bill’s problem is that he does not make his sentences “fit in” with each other.