"SKEPTICS MAY OBJECT"
should no longer face criminal sanctions. We must shift our entire approach to drug abuse from the criminal justice system to the public health system. Congress should appoint an independent commission to study the harm-reduction policies that have been adopted in Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands, The commission should recommend policies for the United States based on one important criterion: what works.
In a nation where pharmaceutical companies advertise powerful antidepressants on billboards and where alcohol companies run amusing beer ads during the Super Bowl, the idea of a "drug-free society" is absurd. Like the rest of American society, our drug policy would greatly benefit from less punishment and more compassion.
Eric Schlosser, "A People's Democratic Platform"
2. Look over something you've written that makes an argument. Check to see if you've anticipated and responded to any objections. It not, revise your text to do so. If so, have you anticipated all the likely objections' Who if anyone have you attributed the objections to? Have you represented the objections fairly? Have you answered them well enough, or do you think you now need to qualify your own argument.7 Could you use any of the language suggested in this chapter? Does the introduction of a naysayer strengthen your argument? Why, or why not?
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"SO WHAT? WHO CARES?"
Saying Why It Matters
—a—
Baseball ts the national pastime. Bernini was the best sculptor of the baroque period. All writing is conversational. So what? Who cares? Why does any of this matter?
How many times have you had reason to ask these questions? Regardless of how interesting a topic may be to you as a writer, readers always need to know what is at stake in a text and why they should care. AH too often, however, these questions are left unanswered—mainly because writers and speakers assume that audiences will know the answers already or will figure them out on their own. As a result, students come away from lectures feeling like outsiders to what they've just heard, just as many of us feel left hanging after talks we've attended. The problem is not necessarily that the speakers lack a clear, well-focused thesis or that the thesis is inadequately supported with evidence. Instead, the problem is that the speakers don't address the crucial question of why their arguments matter.
That this question is so often left unaddressed is unfortunate since the speakers generally could offer interesting, engaging answers. When pressed, for instance, most academics will tell you that their lectures and articles matter because they address
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"SO WHAT? WHO CARES?"
Saying Why it Matters
some belief that needs to be corrected or updated-—and because their arguments have important, real-world consequences. Yet many academics fail to identify these reasons and consequences explicitly in what they say and write. Rather than assume that audiences will know why their claims matter, all writers need to answer the "so what?" and "who cares?" questions up front. Not everyone can claim to have a cure for cancer or a solution to end poverty. But writers who fail to show that others should care or already do care about their claims will ultimately lose their audiences' interest.
This chapter focuses on various moves that you can make to answer the "who cares?" and "so what?" questions in your own writing. In one sense, the two questions get at the same thing: the relevance or importance of what you are saying. Yet they get at this significance in different ways. Whereas "who cares?" literally asks you to identify a person or group who cares about your claims, "so what?" asks about the real-world applications and consequences of those claims—what difference it would make if they were accepted. We'll look first at ways of making clear who cares.
"WHO CARES?"
To see how one writer answers the "who cares?" question, consider the following passage from the science writer Denise Grady. Writing in the New York Times, she explains some of the latest research into fat cells.
Scientists used to think body fat and the cells it was made of were pretty much inert, just an oily storage compartment. But within the past decade research has shown that fat cells act like chemical factories and that body fat is potent stuff: a highly active
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tissue that, secretes hormones and other substances with profound and sometimes harmful effects. . . .
In recent years, biologists have begun calling fat an "endocrine organ," comparing it. to glands like the thyroid and pituitary, which also release hormones straight into the bloodstream.
Denise Grady, "The Secret Life of a Potent Cell"
Notice how Grady's writing reflects the central advice we give in this hook, offering a clear claim and also framing that claim as a response to what someone else has said. In so doing, Grady immediately identifies at least one group with a stake in the new research that sees fat as "active," "potent stuff": namely, the scientific community, which formerly believed that body fat is inert. By referring to these scientists, Grady implicitly acknowledges that her text is part of a larger conversation and shows who besides herself has an interest in what she says.
Consider, however, how the passage would read had Grady left out what "scientists used to think" and simply explained the new findings in isolation.
Within the past few decades research has shown that fat cells act like chemical factories and that body fat is potent stuff: a highly active tissue that secretes hormones and other substances. In recent years, biologists have begun calling fat air "endocrine organ," comparing it to glands like the thyroid and pituitary, which also release hormones straight into the bloodstream.
Though this statement is clear and easy to follow, it lacks any indication that anyone needs to hear it. Okay, one nods while reading this passage, fat is an active, potent thing. Sounds plausible enough; no reason to think it's not true. But does anyone really care? Who, if anyone, is interested?
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SSVEN      "SO WHAT? WHO CARES?"
TEMPLATES FOR INDICATING WHO CARES
To address "who cares?" questions in your own writing, we suggest using templates like the following, which echo Grady in refuting earlier thinking.
*" Parents used to think spanking was necessaru- But recently [or within the past few decades] experts suggest that it can be counterproductive.
► This interpretation challenges the work of those critics who have long assumed that____________.
► These findings challenge the work of earlier researchers, who tended to assume that
Recent studies like these shed new light on previous studies had not addressed.
, which
Grady might have been more explicit by writing the "who cares?" question directly into her rext, as in the following template.
► But who really cares? Who besides me and a handful of recent researchers has a stake in these claims? At the very least, the researchers who formerly believed_________should care.
To gain greater authority as a writer, it can help to name specific people or groups who have a stake in your claims and to go into some detail about their views.
► Researchers have long assumed that.___. For instance,
one eminent scholar of cell biology,_____, assumed
in____, her seminal work on cell structures and functions,
that fat cells_____. As _ herself put it,"
__.___, argued that fat
Saying Why It Matters
cells "________._" (2011). Ultimately, when it came to the nature
of fat, the basic assumption was that__________.
But a new body of research shows that fat cells are far more complex and that_____
In other cases, you might refer to certain people or groups who should care about your claims.
► If sports enthusiasts stopped to think about it, many of them might simply assume that the most successful athletes _________. However, new research shows__________.
► These findings challenge neoliberals' common assumption that_____.___.
At first glance, teenagers might say inspection_________.----■
. But on closer
(2012). Another leading scientist,
As these templates suggest, answering the "who cares?" question involves establishing the type of contrast between what others say and what you say that is central to this book. Ultimately, such templates help you create a dramatic tension or clash of views in your writing that readers will feel invested in and want to see resolved.
"SO WHAT?"
Although answering the "who cares?" question is crucial, in many cases it is not enough, especially if you are writing for general readers who don't necessarily have a strong investment in the particular clash of views you are setting up. In the case of Grady's argument about fat cells, such readers may still wonder why it matters that some researchers think fat cells are active,
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!i-;:Vv-.!.       "SO WHAT? WHO CARES?"
while others think they're inert. Or, to move to a different field of study, American literature, so what if some scholars disagree about Huck Finn's relationship with the runaway slave Jim in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn7. Why should anyone besides a few specialists in the field care about such disputes? What, if anything, hinges on them?
The best way to answer such questions about the larger consequences of your claims is to appeal to something that your audience already figures to care about. Whereas the "who cares?" question asks you to identify an interested person or group, the "so what?" question asks you to link your argument to some larger matter that readers already deem important. Thus in analyzing Huckleberry Finn, a writer could argue that seemingly narrow disputes about the hero's relationship with Jim actually shed light on whether Twain's canonical, widely read novel is a critique of racism in America or is itself marred by it.
Let's see how Grady invokes such broad, general concerns in her article on. fat cells. Her first move is to link researchers' interest in fat cells to a general concern with obesity and health.
Researchers trying to decipher the biology of fat cells hope to find new ways to help people get rid of excess fat or, at least, prevent obesity from destroying their health. In an increasingly obese world, their ettdrts have taken on added importance.
Further showing why readers should care, Grady's next move is to demonstrate the even broader relevance and urgency of her subject matter.
internationally, more than a billion people are overweight. Obesity and two illnesses linked to it, heart disease and high blood pressure, are on the World Health Organization's list of the top 10 global health risks, in the United States, 65 percent, of adults weigh too much,
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Saying Why It Matters
compared with about 56 percent a decade ago, and government researchers blame obesity for at least. 300,000 deaths a year.
What Grady implicitly says here is "Look, dear reader, you may think that these questions about the nature of fat cells I've been pursuing have little to do with everyday life. In fact, however, these questions are extremely important—particularly in our 'increasingly obese world' in which we need to prevent obesity from destroying our health."
Notice that Grady's phrase "in an increasingly___________world"
can be adapted as a strategic move to address the "so what?" question in other fields as well. For example, a sociologist analyzing back-to-nature movements of the past thirty years might make the following statement.
In a world increasingly dominated by cell phones and sophisticated computer technologies, these attempts to return to nature appear futile.
This type of move can be teadily applied to other disciplines because no matter how much disciplines may differ from one another, the need to justify the importance of one's concerns is common to them all.
TEMPLATES FOR ESTABLISHING WHY YOUR CLAIMS MATTER
> Huckleberry Finn matters/is important because it.Js...oneof_.the
► Although X may seem trivial, it is in fact crucial in terms of today's concern over________________.
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'SO WHAT? WHO CARES?"
►  Ultimately, what is at stake here is
►   These findings have important implications for the broader domain of
_, then major consequences fol-
► If we are right about____
low for ____,
► These conclusions/This discovery will have significant applications in________as well as in______.
Finally, you can also treat the "so what?" question as a related aspect of the "who cares?" question.
► Although X may seem of concern to only o small group
of______________, it should in fact concern anyone who cares
about
All these templates help you hook your readers. By suggesting the real-world applications of your claims, the templates not only demonstrate that others care about your claims but also tell your readers why they should care. Again, it bears repeating that simply stating and proving your thesis isn't enough. You also need to frame it in a way that helps readers care about it.
WHAT ABOUT READERS WHO ALREADY KNOW WHY IT MATTERS?
At this point, you might wonder if you need to answer the "who cares?" and "so what?" questions in everything you write. Is it really necessary to address these questions if you're proposing something so obviously consequential as, say, a treatment for autism or a program to eliminate illiteracy? Isn't it obvious
Saying Why It Matters
that everyone cares about such problems? Does it really need to be spelled out? And what about when you're writing for audiences who you know are already interested in your claims and who understand perfectly well why they're important? In other words, do you always need to address the "so what?" and "who cares?" questions?
As a rule, yes—although it's true that you can't keep answering them forever and at a certain point must say enough is enough. Although a determined skeptic can infinitely ask why something matters—"Why should 1 care about earning a salary? And why should I care about supporting a family?"—you have to stop answering at some point in your text. Nevertheless, we urge you to go as far as possible in answering such questions. If you take it for granted that readers will somehow intuit the answers to "so what?" and "who cares?" on their own, you may make your work seem less interesting than it actually is, and you run the risk that readers will dismiss your text as irrelevant and unimportant. By contrast, when you are careful to explain who cares and why, it's a little like bringing a cheerleading squad into your text. And though some expert readers might already know why your claims matter, even they need to be reminded. Thus the safest move is to be as explicit as possible in answering the "so what?" question, even for those already in the know. When you step back from the text and explain why it matters, you are urging your audience to keep reading, pay attention, and care.
Exercises
1. Find several texts (scholarly essays, newspaper articles, emails, memos, blogs, etc.) and see whether they answer
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the "so what?" and "who cares?" questions. Probably some do, some don't. What difference does it make whether they do or do not? How do the authors who answer these questions do so? Do they use any strategies or techniques that you could borrow for your own writing? Are there any strategies or techniques recommended in this chapter, or that you've found or developed on your own, that you'd recommend to these authors?
2. Look over something you've written yourself. Do you indicate "so what?" and "who cares?" If not, revise your text to do so. You might use the following template to get started.
My point here (that
shouLd interest those who
----------------------- Beyond this limited audience, however, my point
should speak to anyone who cares about the larger issue of
"AS A RESULT"
Connecting the Parts
We once had a student named Bill, whose characteristic sentence pattern went something like this.
Spot is a good dog. He has fleas.
"Connect your sentences," we urged in the margins of Bill's papers. "What does Spot being good have to do with his fleas?" "These two statements seem unrelated. Can you connect them in some logical way?" When comments like these yielded no results, we tried inking in suggested connections for him.
Spot is a good dog, but he has fleas.
Spot is a good dog, even though he has fleas.
But our message failed to get across, and Bill's disconnected sentence pattern persisted to the end of the semester.
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
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Connecting the Parts
some of Bill's classmates, who sometimes changed topic from sentence to sentence or even from clau.se 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 rhe sentences and paragraphs connected or failed to connect with one another.
What makes such writers so hard to read, in other words, is that they never gesture back to what they have just said or forward to what they plan to say. "Never look back" might be their motto, almost as if they see writing as a process of thinking of something to say about a topic and writing it down, then thinking of something else to say about the topic and writing that down, too, and on and on until they've filled the assigned number of pages and can hand the paper in. Each sentence basically .starts a new thought, rather than growing out of or extending the thought of the previous sentence.
When Bill talked about his writing habits, he acknowledged that he never went back and read what he had written. Indeed, he told us that, other than using his computer software to check for spelling errors and make sure that his tenses were all aligned, he never actually reread what he wrote before mm-ing it in. As Bill seemed to picture it, writing was something one did while sitting at a computer, whereas reading was a separate activity generally reserved for an easy chair, book in hand. It had never occurred to Bill that to write a good sentence he had to think about how it connected to those that came before and after; that he had to think hard about how that sentence fit into the sentences that surrounded it. Each sentence for Bill existed in a sort of tunnel isolated from every other sentence on the page. He nevet bothered to fit all the parts of his essay
together because he apparently thought of writing as a matter of piling up information or observations rather than building a sustained argument. What we suggest in this chapter, then, is that you converse not only with others in your writing hut with yourself: that you establish clear relations between one statement and the next by connecting those statements.
This chapter addresses the issue of how to connect all the parts of your writing. The best compositions establish a sense of momentum and direction by making explicit connections among their different parts, so that what is said in one sentence (or paragraph) both sets up what is to come and is clearly informed by what has already been said. When you write a sentence, you create an expectation in the reader's mind that the next sentence will in some way echo and extend it, even if—especially if—that next sentence takes your argument in a new direction.
It may help to think of each sentence you write as having arms that reach backward and forward, as the figure below suggests. When your sentences reach outward like this, they establish connections that help your writing flow smoothly in a way readers appreciate. Conversely, when writing lacks such connections and moves in fits and staffs, readers repeatedly have to go back over the sentences and guess at the connections on their own. To prevent such disconnection and make your writing flow, we advise
ya/A
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K  O H ■       "AS A RESULT"
following a "do-it-yourself" principle, which means that it is your job as a writer to do the hard work of making the connections rather than, as Bill did, leaving this work to your readers.
This chapter offers several strategies you can use to put this principle into action: (1) using transition terms (like "therefore" and "as a result"); (2) adding pointing words (like "this" or "such"); (3) developing a set of key terms and phrases for each text you write; and (4) repeating yourself, but with a difference—a move that involves repeating what you've said, but with enough variation to avoid being redundant. All these moves require that you always look back and, in crafting any one sentence, think hard about those that precede it.
Notice how we ourselves have used such connecting devices thus far in this chapter. The second paragraph of this chapter; for example, opens with the transitional "And yet," signaling a change in direction, while the opening sentence of the third includes the phrase "in other words," telling you to expect a restatement of a point we've just made. If you look through this book, you should be able to find many sentences that contain some word or phrase that explicitly hooks them back to something said earlier, to something about to be said, or both. And many sentences in this chapter repeat key terms related to the idea of connection: "connect," "disconnect," "link," "relate," "forward," and "backward."
USE TRANSITIONS
For readers to follow your train of thought, you need not only to connect your sentences and paragraphs to each other, but also to mark the kind of connection you ate making. One of the easiest ways to make this move is to use transitions (from
Connecting" the Parts
the Latin root trans, "across"), which help you cross from one point to another in your text. Transitions are usually placed at or near the start of sentences so they can signal to readers where your text is going: in the same direction it has been moving, or in a new direction. More specifically, transitions rell readers whether your text is echoing a previous sentence or paragraph ("in other words"), adding something to it ("in addition"), offering an example of it ("for example"), generalizing from it ("as a result"), or modifying it ("and yet").
The following is a list of commonly used transitions, categorized according to their different functions.
ADDITION
also and
besides furthermore in addition
ELABORATION
actually by extension In other words in short that is
EXAMPLE
after all
as an illustration
consider
for example
in fact indeed moreover so too
to put it another way to put it bluntly to put it succinctly ultimately
for instance specifically
to take a case in point
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"AS A RESULT"
Connecting the Parts
CAUSE AND EFFECT
accordingly as a result consequently hence since
COMPARISON
along the same !fnes in the same way
CONTRAST
although but
by contrast conversely despite even though however in contrast
CONCESSION
admittedly although it is true granted
CONCLUSION
as a result
consequently
hence
in conclusion in short
so then
therefore thus
likewise similarly
nevertheless
nonetheless
on the contrary
on the other hand
regardless
whereas
while yet
naturally of course to be sure
in sum
therefore
thus
to sum up to summarize
Ideally, transitions should operate so unobtrusively in a piece of writing that they recede into the background and readers do not even notice that they are there. It's a hit like what happens when drivers use their turn signals before turning right or left: just as other drivers recognize such signals almost unconsciously, readers should process transition terms with a minimum of thought. But even though such terms should function unobtrusively in your writing, they can be among the most powerful tools in your vocabulary. Think how your heart sinks when someone, immediately after praising you, begins a sentence with "but" or "however." No matter what follows, you know it won't be good.
Notice that some transitions can help you not only to move from one sentence to another, but to combine two or more sentences into one. Combining sentences in this way helps prevent the choppy, staccato effect that arises when too many short sentences are strung together, one after the other. For instance, to combine Bill's two choppy sentences ("Spot is a good dog. He has fleas.") into one, better-flowing sentence, we suggested that he rewrite them as "Spot is a good dog, even though he has fleas."
Transitions like these not only guide readers through the twists and turns of your argument but also help ensure that you have an argument in the first place. In fact, we think of words like "but," "yet," "nevertheless," "besides," and others as argument words, since it's hard to use them without making some kind of argument. The word "therefore," for instance, commits you to making sure that the claims preceding it lead logically to the conclusion that it introduces. "For example" also assumes an argument, since it requires the material you are introducing to stand as an instance or proof of some preceding generalization. As a result, the more you use transitions, the more you'll be able not only to connect the parts of your text but also to construct
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a strong argument in the first pface. And if you draw on them frequently enough, using them should eventually become sec-ond nature.
To be sure, it is possible to overuse transitions, so take time to read over your drafts carefully and eliminate any transitions that are unnecessary. But following the maxim that you need to learn the basic moves of argument before you can deliberately depart from them, we advise you not to forgo explicit transition terms until you've first mastered their use. In all our years of teaching, we've read countless essays that suffered from having few or no transitions, but cannot recall one in which the transitions were overused. Seasoned writers sometimes omit explicit transitions, but only because they rely heavily on the other types of connecting devices that we turn to in the rest of this chapter.
Before doing so, however, let us warn you about inserting transitions without really thinking through their meanings— using "therefore," say, when your text's logic actually requires "nevertheless" or "however." So beware. Choosing transition terms should involve a hit of mental sweat, since the whole point of using them is to make your writing more reader-friendly, not less. The only thing more frustrating than reading Bill-style passages like "Spot is a good dog. He has fleas" is reading mis-connected sentences like "Spot is a good dog. For example, he has fleas."
USE POINTING WORDS
Another way to connect the parts of your argument is by using pointing words—which, as their name implies, point or refer backward to some concept in the previous sentence. The most common of these pointing words include "this," "these," "that,"
Connecting the Parts
"those," "their," and "such" {as in "these pointing words" near the start of this sentence) and simple pronouns like "his," "he," "her," "she," "it," and "their." Such terms help you create the flow we spoke of earlier that enables readers to move effortlessly through your text. In a sense, these terms are like an invisible hand reaching out of your sentence, grabbing what's needed in the previous sentences and pulling it along.
Like transitions, however, pointing words need to be used carefully. It's dangerously easy to insert pointing words into your text that don't refer to a clearly defined object, assuming that because the object you have in mind is clear to you it will also be clear to your readers. For example, consider the use of "this" in. the following passage.
Alexis de Tocqueville was highly critical of democratic societies, which he saw as tending toward mob rule. At the same time, he accorded democratic societies grudging respect. This is seen in Tocqueville's statement that . . .
When "this" is used in such a way it becomes an ambiguous or free-floating pointer, since readers can't tell if it refers to Tocqueville's critical attitude toward democratic societies, his grudging respect for them, or some combination of both. "This what?" readers mutter as they go back over such passages and try to figure them out. It's also tempting to try to cheat with pointing words, hoping that they will conceal or make up for conceptual confusions that may lurk in your argument. By referring to a fuzzy idea as "this" or "that," you might hope the fuziiness will somehow come across as clearer than it is.
You can fix problems caused by a free-floating pointer by making sure there is one and only one possible object in the vicinity that the pointer could be referring to. It also often helps
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Connecting the Parts
A third strategy for connecting the parts of your argument is |
to develop a constellation of key terms and phrases, including %
their synonyms and antonyms, that you repeat throughout your |
text. When used effectively, your key terms should be items ^
that readers could extract from your text in order to get a solid |
sense of your topic. Playing with key terms also can be a good I
way to come up with a title and appropriate section headings |
for your text. I
Notice how often Martin Luther King Jr. uses the key words i
"criticism," "statement," "answer," and "correspondence" in the I
opening paragraph of his famous "Lettet from Birmingham Jail." f
Dear Fellow Clergymen: 1
While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across |
your recent statement calling my present, activities "unwise and |
untimely." Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and \
ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, \
my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such j
correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time |
for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine I
good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to | try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and
reasonable terms. \
Martin Luther King Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail" I
Even though King uses the terms "criticism" and "answer" three times each and "statement" twice, the effect is not overly repetitive. In fact, these key terms help build a sense of momentum in the paragraph and bind it together.
For another example of the effective use of key terms, consider the following passage, in which the historian Susan Douglas develops a constellation of sharply contrasting key terms around the concept of "cultural schizophrenics": women like herself who, Douglas claims, have mixed feelings about the images of ideal femininity with which they are constantly bombarded by the media.
In a variery of ways, the mass media helped make us the cultural schizophrenics we are today, women who rebel against yet submit to prevailing images about what a desirable, worthwhile woman should be. . . . [Tjhe mass media has engendered in many women a kind of cultural identity crisis. We are ambivalent toward femininity on the one hand and feminism on the other. Pulled in opposite directions—told we were equal, yet told we were subordinate; told we could change history but told we were trapped by history—we got the bends at an early age, and we've never gotten rid of them.
When I open Vogue, for example, I am simultaneously infuriated and seduced. ... I adore the materialism; I despise the materialism. ... I want to look beautiful; I think wanting to look beautiful is about the most dumb-ass goal you could have. The magazine stokes my desire; the magazine triggers my bile. And this doesn't only happen when I'm reading Vogue; it happens all the time. . . . On the one hand, on the other hand—that's not just me—that's what it means to be a woman in America.
To explain this schizophrenia . . ,
Susan Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media
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In this passage, Douglas establishes "schizophrenia" as a key concept and then echoes it through synonyms like "identity crisis," "ambivalent," "the bends"—and even demonstrates it through a series of contrasting words and phrases:
rebel against / submit
told we were equal / told we were subordinate
told we couid change history / told we were trapped by history
infuriated / seduced
I adore / I despise
I want j I think wanting ... is about the mosr dumb-ass goal stokes my desire / triggers my bile on the one hand / on the other hand
These contrasting phrases help flesh out Douglas's claim that women are being pulled in two directions at once. In so doing, they bind the passage together into a unified whole that, despite its complexity and sophistication, stays focused over its entire length.
REPEAT YOURSELF—BUT WITH A DIFFERENCE
The last technique we offer for connecting the parts of your text involves repeating yourself, but with a difference—which basically means saying the same thing you've just said, hut in a slightly diffetent way that avoids sounding monotonous. To effectively connect the parts of your argument and keep it moving forward, be careful not to leap from one idea to a different idea or introduce new ideas cold. Instead, try to build bridges between your ideas by echoing what you've just said while simultaneously moving your text into new territory.
Connecting the Parts
Several of the connecting devices discussed in this chapter are ways of repeating yourself in this special way. Key terms, pointing terms, and even many transitions can be used in a way that not only brings something forward from the previous sentence but in some way alters it. When Douglas, for instance, uses the key term "ambivalent" to echo her earlier reference to schizophrenics, she is repeating herself with a difference— repeating the same concept, but with a different word that adds new associations.
In addition, when you use transition phrases like "in other words" and "to put it another way," you repeat yourself with a difference, since these phrases help you restate earlier claims but in a different register. When you open a sentence with "in other words," you are basically telling your readers that in case they didn't fully understand what you meant in the last sentence, you are now coming at it again from a slightly different angle, or that since you're presenting a very important idea, you're not going to skip over it quickly but will explore it further to make sure your readers grasp all its aspects,
We would even go so far as to suggest that after your first sentence, almost every sentence you write should refer back to previous statements in some way. Whether you are writing a "furthermore" comment that adds to what you have just said or a "for example" statement that illustrates it, each sentence should echo at least one element of the previous sentence in some discernible way. Even when your text changes direction and requires transitions like "in contrast," "however," or "but," you still need to mark that shift by linking the sentence to the one just before it, as in the following example.
Cheyenne loved basketball. Nevertheless, she feared her height would put. her at a disadvantage.
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"AS A RESULT
Connecting the Parts
These sentences work because even though the second sentence changes course and qualifies the first, it still echoes key concepts from the first. Not only does "she" echo "Cheyenne," since both refer to the same person, but "feared" echoes "loved" by establishing the conttast mandated by the term "nevertheless." "Nevertheless," then, is not an excuse for changing subjects radically. It too requires repetition to help readers shift gears with you and follow your train of thought.
Repetition, in short, is the central means by which you can move from point A to point B in a text. To introduce one last analogy, think of the way experienced rock climbers move up a steep slope. Instead of jumping or lurching from one handhold to the next, good climbers get a secure handhold on the position they have established before reaching for the next ledge. The same thing applies to writing. To move smoothly from point to point, in your atgument, you need to firmly ground what you say in what you've already said. In this way, your writing remains focused while simultaneously moving forward.
"But hold on," you may be thinking. "Isn't repetition precisely what sophisticated writers should avoid, on the grounds that it will make their writing sound simplistic—as if they are belaboring the obvious?" Yes and no. On the one hand, writers certainly can run into trouble if they merely repeat themselves and nothing more. On the other hand, repetition is key to creating continuity in writing. It is impossible to stay on track in a piece of writing if you don't tepeat your points throughout the length of the text. Furthermore, writers would never make an impact on readers if they didn't repeat their main points often enough to reinforce those points and make them stand out above subordinate points. The trick therefore is not to avoid repeating yourself but to repeat yourself in varied and interesting enough ways that you advance your argument without sounding tedious.
Exercises
1. Read the following opening to Chapter 2 of The Road to Wigan Pier, by George Orwell. Annotate the connecting devices by underlining the transitions, circling the key terms, and putting boxes around the pointing terms.
Our civilisation ... is founded on coal, more completely than one realises until one stops to think about it. The machines that keep us alive, and the machines that make the machines, are all directly or indirectly dependent upon coal. In the metabolism of the Western world the coal-miner is second in importance only to the man who ploughs the soil. He is a sort of grimy caryatid upon whose shoulders nearly everything that is not grimy is supported. For this reason the actual process by which coal is extracted is well worth watching, if you get the chance and ate willing to take the trouble.
When you go down a coal-mine it is important to try and get to the coal face when the "fillers" are at work. This is not easy, because when the mine is working visitors are a nuisance and are not encouraged, but if you go at any other time, it is possible to come away with a totally wrong impression. On a Sunday, for instance, a mine seems almost peaceful. The time to go there is when the machines are roaring and the air is black with coal dust, and when you can actually see what the miners have to do. At those times the place is like hell, or at any rate like my own mental picture of hell. Most of the things one imagines in hell are there—heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped space. Everything except the fire, for there is no fire down there except the feeble beams of Davy lamps and electric torches which scarcely penetrate the clouds of coal dust.
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When you have finally got there—and getting there is a job in itself: 1 will explain that in a moment—you crawl through the last line, of pit props and see opposite you a shiny black wail three or four feet high. This is the coal face. Overhead is the smooth ceiling made by the rock from which the coal has been cut; underneath is the rock again, so that the gallery you are in Is only as high as the ledge of coal itself, probably not much more than a yard. The first impression of all, overmastering everything else for a while, is the frightful, deafening din from the conveyor belt which carries the coal away. You cannot see very far, because the fog of coal dust throws back the beam of your lamp, but you can see on either side of you the line of halt-naked kneeling men, one to every four or five yards, driving their shovels under the fallen coal and flinging it swiftly over their left shoulders. . . .
George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
2. Read over something you've written with an eye for the devices you've used to connect the parts. Underline all the transitions, pointing terms, key terms, and repetition. Do you see any patterns? Do you rely on certain devices more than others? Are there any passages that are hard to follow-—and if so, can you make them easier to read by trying any of the other devices discussed in this chapter?
"YOU MEAN I CAN JUST SAY IT THAT WAY?"
Academic Writing Doesn't Mean
Setting Aside Your Own Voice
We wish we had a l^ollar for each time a student has asked us a version of the above question. It usually comes when the student is visiting us during our office hours, seeking advice about how to improve a draft of an essay he or she is working on. When we ask the student to tell us in simple words the point he or she is trying to make in the essay, the student will almost invariably produce a statement that is far clearer and
more incisive than anything in the draft.
"Write that down," we will urge. "What you just said is sooo
much better than anything you wrote in your draft. We suggest
going home and revising your paper in a way that makes that
claim the focal point of your essay."
"Really?" our student will ask, looking surprised- "You mean
I can just say it that way?" "Sure. Why not?"
"Well, saying it that, way seems just so elementary—so obvious. 1 mean, I don't want to sound stupid."
n s
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'YOU MEAN I CAN JUST SAY IT THAT WAY?"
Academic Writing Doesn't Mean Setting Aside Your Own Voice
The goal of this chapter is to counteract this common misconception: that relying in college on the straightforward, down-to-earth language you use every day will make you sound stupid; that to impress your teachers you need to set aside your everyday voice and write in a way that is hard to understand.
It's easy to see how this misconception took hold, since academic writing is notoriously obscure. Students can't be blamed for such obscurity when so much of the writing they're assigned to read is so hard to understand—as we can see in the following sentence from a science paper that linguist Steven Pinker quotes in his essay "Why Academics Stink at Writing":
Participants read assertions whose veracity was either affirmed or denied by the subsequent presentation of an assessment word.
After struggling to determine what the writer of this sentence was trying to say, Pinker finally decided it was probably something as simple as this:
Participants read sentences, each followed by the word true or fake.
Had the author revised the original statement by tapping into his or her more relaxed, everyday language, as Pinker did in revising it, much of this struggle could have been avoided. In our view, then, mastering academic writing does not mean completely abandoning your normal voice for one that's, stiff, convoluted, or pompous, as students often assume. Instead, it means creating a new voice that draws on the voice you already have.
This is not to suggest that any language you use among friends has a place in academic wriring. Nor is it to suggest that you may fall back on your everyday voice as an excuse to remain in yout comfort zone and avoid learning the rigorous
11
forms and habits that characterise academic culture. After all, learning new words and rhetorical moves is a part of getting an education. We do, however, wish to suggest that everyday language can often enliven such moves and even enhance your precision in using academic terminology. In our view, then, it is a mistake to assume that the academic and everyday are completely separate languages that can never be used together. Ultimately, we suggest, academic writing is often at its best when it combines what we call "everydayspeak" and "academicspeak."
BLEND ACADEMIC AND COLLOQUIAL STYLES
In fact, we would point out that, many academics are highly successful writers who themselves blend everyday and academic styles. Note, for example, how Judith Fetterley, a prominent scholar in the field of literary studies, blends academic and everyday ways of talking in the following passage on the novelist Willa Cather:
As Merrill Skaggs has put it, "[Gather] is neurotically controlling and self-conscious about her work, but she knows at all points what she is doing. Above all else, she is self-conscious." Without question, Cather was a control freak.
Judith Fetterley, "Willa Cather and the Question of Sympathy: An Unofficial Story"
In this passage, Fetterley makes use of what is probably   see pp. 243-55
1 1    .       r    1 ,     j. j 1    fot an essay that
the most common technique tor blending academic and   mixes col|0quJat everyday language: she puts them side by side, juxtapos- 5tndeascaden,ic ing "neurotically controlling" and "self-conscious" from
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a quoted source with her own colloquial term, "control freak." In this way, Fetterley lightens a potentially dry subject and makes it more accessible and even entertaining.
A TRANSLATION RECIPE
But Fetterley does more than simply put academicspeak and everydayspeak side by side. She takes a step further by translating the one into the other. By translating Skaggs's polysyllabic description of Gather as "neurotically controlling and self-conscious" into the succinct, if blunt, "control freak," Fetterley shows how rarefied, academic ways of talking and more familiar language can not only coexist but actually enhance one another—her informal "control freak" serving to explain the formal language that ptecedes it.
To be sure, slangy, colloquial expressions like "control freak" may be far more common in the humanities than in the sciences, and even in the humanities such casual usages are a recent development. Fifty years ago academic writing in all disciplines was the linguistic equivalent of a black-tie affair. But as times have changed, so has the range of options open to academic writers—so much so that it is not surprising to find writers in all fields using colloquial expressions and referring to movies, music, and other forms of popular culture.
Indeed, Fetterley's passage offers a simple recipe for mixing styles that we encourage you to try out in your own writing: first state the point in academic language, then translate the point into everyday language. Everyone knows that academic terms like "neurotically controlling" and "self-conscious"—and others you might encounter like "subject position" or "bifurcate"—can be hard to understand. But this translation recipe, we think, eases
Academic Writing Doesn't Mean Setting As.de Your Own Voice
such difficulties by making the academic familiar Here is one way you might translate academicspeak into everydayspeak:
> Scholar X argues, -__________________" In other words-------
Instead of "In other words," you might try variations like the following:
> Essentially, X argues--------------■
> X's point, succinctly put, is that —--------
Plainly put,_______-------■
Following Fetters lead and making moves like these can help you not only demystify challenging academic material, but also reinterpret it, showing you understand it (and helping readeis understand it) by putting it into your own terms.
Ht'SBIkSllMJ-YSMWi ] Ji5 THE TIKES CHANGED 1
\v   -v  / SOWTHEVOTWS-/
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"YOU MEAN I CAN JUST SAY IT THAT WAY?"
SELF-TRANSLATION
But this translation recipe need not he limited to clarifying the ideas of others. It can also be used to clarify your own complex ideas, as the following passage by the philosopher Rebecca Goldstein illustrates:
We can hardly get through our lives—-in fact, it's hard to get through a week—without considering what makes specific actions right and others wrong and debating with ourselves whether that is a difference that must compel the actions we choose. (Okay, it's wrong! I get it! But why should 1 care?)
Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googkpkx;
Why Philosophy Won't Go Away
Though Goldstein's first sentence may require several reread-ings, it. is one that most of us, with varying degrees of effort, can come to understand: that we all wrestle regularly with the challenging philosophical questions of what the ethics of a given situation are and whether those ethics should alter our behavior. But instead of leaving us entitely on our own to figure out what she is saying, Goldstein helps us out in her closing parenthetical remarks, which translate the abstractions of her first .sentence into the kind of concrete everydayspeak that runs through our heads.
Yet another example of self-translation—one that actually uses the word "translation"—can he found on the opening page of a book by scholar Helen Sword:
There is a massive gap between what most readers consider to be good writing and what academics typically produce and publish. I'm not talking about the kinds of formal strictures necessarily imposed
Academic Writing Doesn't Mean Setting Aside Your Own Voice
by journal editors.—article length, citation style, and the like—but about a deeper, duller kind of disciplinary monotony, a compulsive proclivity for discursive obscurantism and circumambulatory diction (translation: an addiction to big words and soggy syntax).
Helen Sword, Stylish Academic Writing
In this passage, Sword gives her own unique twist to the translation technique we've been discussing. After a stream of difficult polysyllabic words—"a compulsive proclivity for discursive obscurantism and circumambulatory diction"—she then concludes by translating these words into everydayspeak: "an addiction to big words and soggy syntax." The effect is to dramatize her larger point: the "massive gap between what most readers consider to be good writing and what academics typically produce and publish."
FAMOUS EXAMPLES
Even notoriously difficult thinkers could be said to use the translation practice we have been advocating in this chapter, as the following famous and widely quoted claims illustrate:
I think, therefore 1 am. —René Descartes
The medium is the message. —Marshall McLuhan
The master's tools will never dismantle the master s house.
-—AtlDRE LORDE
Form follows function. —Louis Sullivan
These sentences can he read almost as sound bites, short, catchy statements that express a more complex idea. Though the term "sound bite" is usually used to refer to mindless med.a
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simplifications, the succinct statements above show what valuable work they can do. These distillations are admittedly reductive in that they do not capture all the nuances of the more complex ideas they represent. But consider their power to stick in the minds of readers. Without these memorable translations, we wonder if these authors' ideas would have achieved such widespread ci rculation.
Consider Descartes* "1 think, therefore 1 am," for example, which comes embedded in the following passage, in which Descartes is struggling to find a philosophical foundation for absolute truth in the face of skeptical doctrines that doubt that anything can be known for certain. After putting himself in the shoes of a radical skeptic and imagining what it would be like to believe all apparent truths to be false, Descartes "immediately... observed," he writes,
whilst 1 thus wished to think that all was false, it was absolutely necessary that I, who thus thought, should be somewhat; and as I observed that this truth, I think, therefore I am (cogi'to ergo sum), was so certain and of such evidence that no ground of doubt, however extravagant, could be alleged by the sceptics capable of shaking it, 1 concluded that I might, without scruple, accept it as the first principle of the philosophy of which I was in search.
Rene Descartes, "Discourse on die Method, Part IV"
Had Descartes been less probing and scrupulous, we speculate, he would have stopped writing and ended the passage after the statement "it was absolutely necessary that I, who thus thought, should be somewhat." After all, the passage up to this point contains all the basic ingredients that the rest of it goes on to explain, the simpler, more accessible formulation
Academic Writing Doesn't Mean Setting Aside Your Oum VWce
"I think, therefore I am" being merely a reformulation of this earlier material. But just imagine if Descartes had decided that his job as a writer was finished after his initial claim and had failed to add the more accessible phrase "1 think, therefore I am." We suspect this idea of his would not have become one of the most famous touchstones of Western philosophy.
EVERYDAY LANGUAGE AS A THINKING TOOL
As the examples in this chapter suggest, then, translating academic language into everydayspeak can be an indisj^ensablc tool for clarifying and underscoring ideas for readers. But at an even more basic level, such translation can be an indispensable means for you as a writer to clarify your ideas to yourself. In other words, translating academicspeak into everydayspeak can function as a thinking tool that enables you to discover what you are trying to say to begin with.
For as writing theorists often note, writing is generally not a process in which we start with a fully formed idea in our heads that we then simply transcribe in an unchanged state onto the page. On the contrary, writing is more often a means of discovery in which we use the writing process to figure out what our idea is. This is why writers are often surprised to find that what they end up with on the page is quite different from what they thought it would be when they started. What we are trying to say here is that everydayspeak is often crucial for this discovery process, that translating your ideas into more common, simpler terms can help you figure out what your ideas really are, as opposed to what you initially imagined they were. Even Descartes, for example, may not have had the formulation "I think, therefore 1 am" in mind before he wrote the passage
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'YOU MEAN I CAN JUST SAY IT THAT WAY?'
above; instead, he may have arrived at it as he worked through the writing process.
We ourselves have been reminded of this point when engaged in our own writing. One major benefit of writing collaboratively, as the two of us do, is that it repeatedly forces us to explain in simpler terms our less-than-clear ideas when one of us doesn't already know what the other means. In the process of writing and revising this book, for instance, we were always turning to each other after reading something the other had written and asking a version of the "Can-you-explain-that-more'-simply?" question that we described asking our students in our office in this chapter's opening anecdote: "What do you mean?" "I don't get it—can you explain?" "Huh!?" Sometimes, when the idea is finally stated in plain, everyday terms, we realize that it doesn't make sense or that it amounts to nothing more than a cliche—or that we have something worth putsuing. It's as if using everyday language to talk through a draft—as any writer can do by asking others to critique his or her drafts—shines a bright light on our writing to expose its strengths and weaknesses.
STiLL NOT CONVINCED?
To be sure, not everyone will be as enthusiastic as we are about the benefits of everydayspeak. Many will insist that, while some fields in the humanities may be open to everyday language, colloquial expressions, and slang, most fields in the sciences are not. And some people in both the humanities and the sciences will argue that some ideas simply can't be done justice to in everyday language. "Theory X," they will say, "is just too complex to be explained in simple terms," or "You have to be in the field to understand it." Perhaps so. But at least one
Academic Writing Doesn't Mean Setting Aside Your Own Voice
distinguished scientist, the celebrated atomic physicist Enrico Fermi, thought otherwise. Fermi, it is said, believed that all faculty in his field should teach basic physics to undergraduates, because having to explain the science in relatively plain English helped to clarify their thinking. This last point can be stated as a rule of thumb: if you can't explain it to your Aunt Franny, chances are you don't understand it yourself.
Furthermore, when writers tell themselves that their ideas are just too complex to be explained to nonspecialists, they risk fooling themselves into thinking that they are making more sense than they actually are. Translating academicspeak into everydayspeak functions as a kind of baloney detector, a way of keeping us honest when we're in danger of getting carried away by our own verbosity.
CODE-MESHING
"But come on," some may say. "Get real! Academic, writing must, in many cases, mean setting aside our own voices." Sure, it may be fine to translate challenging academic ideas into plain everyday language, as Goldstein, Sword, and Descartes do above, when it's a language that your audience will understand and find acceptable. But what if your everyday language— the one you use when you're most relaxed, with family and friends-—is filled with slang and questionable grammar? And what if your everyday language is an ethnic or regional dialect— or a different language altogether? Is there really a place for such language in academic, professional, or public writing?
Yes and no- On the one hand, there are many situations-— like when you're applying for a job or submitting a proposal to be read by an official screening body—in which it's probably
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Him       "YOU MEAN I CAN JUST SAY IT THAT WAY?"
safest to write in "standard" English. On the other hand, the line between language that might confuse audiences and language that engages or challenges them is not always obvious. Not is the line between foreign words that readers don't already know and those that readers might happily learn. After all, "standard" written English is more open and inclusive than it may at first appear. And readers often appreciate writers who take risks and mix things up.
Many prominent writers mix standard written English with other dialects or languages, employing a practice that cultural and linguistic theorists Vershavvn Ashanti Young and Suresh Canagarajah call "code-meshing." For instance, in the titles of two of her books, Taikin and Testify in: The Language of Black America and Black Talk: Words and Phrases From the Hood to the Amen Corner, the language scholar Geneva Smither-man mixes African American vernacular phrases with more scholarly language in order to suggest, as she explicitly argues in these books, that, black vernacular English is as legitimate a variety of language as "standard" English. Here are three typical passages:
in Black America, the oral tradition has served as a fundamental vehicle for gittin ovah. That tradition preserves the Afro-American heritage and reflects the collective spirit of the race.
Blacks are quick ro ridicule "educated fools," people who done gone to school and read all dem books and still don't know nnth in!
It is a socially approved vetbal strategy for black rappers to talk about how bad they is.
Geneva Smitherman, Taikin and Testifyin: Tim Language of Black America
Academic Writing Doesn't Mean Setting Aside Your Own Voice
In these examples, Smitherman blends the types of terms we expect in scholarly writing like "oral tradition" and "fundamental vehicle" with black vernacular phrases like "gittin ovah." She even blends the standard English spelling of words with African American English variants like "dem" and "ovah" in a way that evokes how some speakers of African American English sound. Some might object to these unconventional practices, but this is precisely Smitherman's point: that our habitual language practices need to he opened up, and that the number of participants in the academic conversation needs to be expanded.
Along similar lines, the writer and activist Gloria Amaldua mixes standard English with what she calls Chicano Spanish to make a political point about the suppression of the Spanish language in the United States. In one typical passage, she writes:
From this racial, ideological, cultural, and biological cross-polliniration, an "alien" consciousness is presently in the making— a new memza consciousness, una conciencia de mujer.
Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlajids / La Frontera: The New Mestiza
Anzaldua gets her point across not only through what she says but through the way she says it, showing that the new hybrid, or "mestiza consciousness," that she celebrates is, as she puts it, "presently in the making." Ultimately, such code-meshing suggests that, languages, like the people who speak them, are nor distinct, separate islands.
Because there are so many options in writing, then, there is no need to ever feel limited in your choice of words. You can always experiment with your language and improve it. Depending on your audience and purpose, and how much risk you're
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"YOU MEAN I CAN JUST SAY IT THAT WAY?'
willing to take, you can dress up your language, dress it down, or some combination of both. You could even recast the title of this book, "They Say / I Say," as a teenager might say it: "She Goes / I'm Like."
We hope you agree with us, then, that to succeed as a college writer, you need not always set aside your everyday voice, even when that voice may initially seem unwelcome in the academic world. It is by blending everyday language with standard written English that what counts as "standard" changes and the range of possibilities open to academic writers continues to grow.
Exercises
1. Take a paragraph from this book and dress it down, rewriting it in informal colloquial language. Then rewrite the same paragraph again by dressing it up, making it much more formal. Then rewrite the paragraph one more time in a way that blends the two styles. Share your paragraphs with a classmate, and discuss which versions are most effective and why.
2. Find something you've written for a course, and study it to see whether you've used any of yout own everyday expressions, any words or structures that are not "academic." If by chance you don't find any, see if there's a place or two where shifting into more casual or unexpected language would help you make a point, get your reader's attention, or just add liveliness to your text. Be sure to keep your audience and purpose in mind, and use language that will be appropriate to both.
"BUT DON'T GET ME WRONG"
The Art of Metacommentary
When we tell people that we are writing a chapter on the art of metacommentary, they often give us a puzzled look and tell us that they have no idea what "metacommentary" is. "We know what commentary is," they'll sometimes say, "but what does it mean when it's meta?" Our answer is that whether or not they know the term, they practice the art of metacommentary on a daily basis whenever they make a point of explaining something they've said or written: "What I meant to say
was_____"My point was not____but__._______
or "You're probably not going to like what I'm about to say,
but________." In such cases, they are not offering new points
but telling an audience how to interpret what they have already said or are about to say. In short, then, metacommentary is a way of commenting on your claims and telling others how—and how not—to think about them.
It may help to think of metacommentary as being like the chorus in a Greek play that stands to the side of the drama unfolding on the stage and explains its meaning to the audience—or iike a voice-over narrator who comments on
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H "BUT DON'T GET ME WRONG"
and explains the action in a television show or movie. Think of metacommentary as a sort of second text that stands alongside your main text and explains what it means. In the main text you say something; in the metatext you guide your readers in interpreting and processing what you've said.
What we are suggesting, then, is that you think of your text as two texts joined at the hip: a main text in which you make your argument and another in which you "work" your ideas, distinguishing your views from others they may be confused with, anticipating and answering objections, connecting one point to another, explaining why your claim might be controversial, and so forth. The figure below demonstrates what we mean.
*u3Sr££ ™EXT SAVS SOMETHING. THE
REAW*S H0W-4ND HOW NOT- TO THINK ABOUT IT.
The Art of Metacommentary
USE METACOMMENTARY TO CLARIFY AND ELABORATE
But why do you need metacommentary to tell readers what you mean and guide them through your text? Can't you just clearly say what you mean up front? The answer is that, no matter how clear and precise your writing is, readers can still fail to understand it in any number of ways. Even the best writers can provoke reactions in readers that they didn't intend, and even good readers can get lost, in a complicated argument or fail to see how one point connects with another. Readers may also fail to see what follows from your argument, or they may follow your reasoning and examples yet fail to see the larger conclusion you draw from them. They may fail to see your argument's overall significance, or mistake what you are saying for a related argument that they have heard before but that you want to distance yourself from. As a result, no matter how straightforward a writer you are, readers still need you to help them grasp what, you really mean. Because the written word is prone to so much mischief and can be interpreted in so many different, ways, we need metacommentary to keep misinterpretations and other communication misfires at bay.
Another reason to master the art of metacommentary is that it will help you develop your ideas and generate more text. If you have ever had trouble producing the required number of pages for a writing project, metacommentary can help you add both length and depth to your writing. We've seen many students who try to produce a five-page paper sputter to a halt at two or three pages, complaining they've said everything they can think of about theit topic. "I've stated my thesis and
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"BUT DON'T GET ME WRONG"
presented my reasons and evidence," students have told us. "What else is there to do?" It's almost as if such writers have generated a thesis and don't know what to do with it. When these students learn to use metacommentary, however, they get more out of their ideas and write longer, more substantial texts. In sum, metacommentary can help you extract the full potential from your ideas, drawing out important implications, explaining ideas from different perspectives, and so forth.
So even when you may think you've said everything pos-sible in an argument, try inserting the following types of metacommentary.
► In other words, she doesn't realize how right she is.
► What________really means is____
► My point is not______but_____
► Ultimately, then, my goal is to demonstrate that
Ideally, such metacommentary should help you recognize some implications of your ideas that you didn't initially realize were there.
Let's look at how the cultural critic Neil Postman uses metacommentary in the following passage describing the shift in American culture when it began to move from print and reading to television and movies.
It is my intention in this book to show that a great . . . shift has taken place in America, with the result that the content of much of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense. With thk in view, my task in the chapters ahead is straightforward. I must, first, demonstrate how, under the governance of the printing
The Art of Metacommentary
press, discourse in America was different from what it is now— generally coherent, serious and rational; and then how, under the governance of television, it has become shriveled and absurd. But to avoid the possibility that my analysis will be interpreted as standard-brand academic whimpering, a kind of elitist complaint against "junk" on television, I must first explain that... I appreciate junk as much as the next fellow, and 1 know full well that the printing press has generated enough of it to fill the Grand Canyon to overflowing. Television is not old enough to have matched
printing's output of junk.
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age 0/ Show Business
To see what we mean by metacommentary, look at the phrases above that we have italicized. With these moves, Postman essentially stands apart from his main ideas to help readers follow and understand what he is arguing.
He previews what he will argue: It is my intention in this book to show . . .
He spells out how he will make his atgument: With this in view, my task in the chapters ahead is ... I must, first, demonstrate . . . and then . . .
He distinguishes his argument from other arguments it may easily be confused with; But to avoid the possibility that my analysis will be interpreted as ... 1 must first explain that . . .
TITLES AS METACOMMENTARY
Even the title of Postman's book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Bitsiness, functions as a form of
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metacommentary since, like all titles, it. stands apart from the text itself and tells readers the book's main point: that the very plea-sure provided by contemporary show business is destructive.
Titles, in fact, are one of the most important forms of metacommentary, functioning rather like carnival barkers telling passersby what they can expect if they go inside. Subtitles, too, function as metacommentary, further explaining or elaborating on the main title. The subtitle of this book, for example, not only explains that it is about "the moves that matter in academic writing," but indicates that "they say / I say" is one of these moves. Thinking of a title as metacommentary can actually help you develop sharper titles, ones that, like Postman's, give readers a hint of what your argument will be. Contrast such titles with unhelpfully open-ended ones like "Shakespeare" or "Steroids" or "English Essay" or essays with no titles at all. Essays with vague titles (or no titles) send the. message that the writer has simply not bothered to reflect on what he or she is saying and is uninterested in guiding or orienting readers.
USE OTHER MOVES AS METACOMMENTARY
Many of the other moves covered in this book function as metacommentary: entertaining objections, adding transitions, framing quotations, answering "so what?" and "who cares?" When you entertain objections, you stand outside of your text and imagine what a critic might say; when you add transitions, you essentially explain the relationship between various claims. And when you answer the "so what?" and "who cares?" questions, you look beyond your central argument and explain who should be interested in it and why.
The Art of Metacommentary
TEMPLATES FOR INTRODUCING METACOMMENTARY
TO WARD OFF POTENTIAL MISUNDERSTANDINGS
The following moves help you differentiate certain views from ones they might be mistaken for.
*   Essentially, I am arguing not that we should give up the policu,, but that we should monitor effects far more closely.
but rather__________
than with_____
*■  This is not to say________________
>   X is concerned less with „. TO ELABORATE ON A PREVIOUS [DEA
The following moves elaborate on a previous point, saying to readers: "In case you didn't get it the first time, I'll try saying the same thing in a different way,"
► In other words,_____________.
► To put it another way,_______.
►  What X is saying here is that_„__.
TO PROVIDE A ROAD MAP TO YOUR TEXT
This move orients readers, clarifying where you have been and where you are going—and making it easier for them to process and follow your text.
►   Chapter 2 explores
while Chapter 3 examines
►  Having just argued that-------
point by_________•
I want now to complicate the
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"BUT DON'T GET ME WRONG" TO MOVE FROM A GENERAL CLAIM TO A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE
These moves help you explain a general point by providing a concrete example that illustrates what you're saying. ►   For example,__
*■ Consider
for instance, demonstrates --> for example.
"   To take a case in point,
TO INDICATE THAT A CLAIM IS MORE, LESS, OR EQUALLY IMPORTANT
The following templates help you give relative emphasis to the claim that you are introducing, showing whether that claim is of more or less weight than the previous one, or equal to it.
► Even more important,_________.
> But above all,
► Incidentally, we will briefly note,
► Just as important,__.
► EqualLy,___-
► Finally, __.
TO EXPUW A CLAIM WHEN YOU ANIMATE OBJECT.ONS
►   Although some readers may object that answer that
I would
The Art 0/ Metacommentary TO GUIDE READERS TO YOUR MOST GENERAL POINT
Chapter 6 has more
These moves show that you are wrapping things up and   InHcipatfng'
tying up various subpoints previously made.
objections.
*   In sum, then,
► My conclusion, then, is that.
► In short, ._.
In this chapter we have tried to show that the most persuasive writing often doubles back and comments on its own claims in ways that help readers negotiate and process them. Instead of simply piling claim upon claim, effective writers are constantly "stage-managing" how their claims will be received. It's true of course that to be persuasive a text has to have strong claims to argue in the first place. But even the strongest arguments will flounder unless writers use metacommentary to prevent potential misreadings and make their arguments shine.
Exercises
1. Read an essay or article and annotate it to indicate the different ways the author uses metacommentary. Use the templates on pages 137-39 as your guide. For example, you may want to circle transitional phrases and write "trans" in the margins, to put brackets around sentences that elaborate on earlier sentences and mark them "elab," or underline sentences in which the author sums up what he or she has been saying, writing "sum" in the margins.
How does the author use metacommentary? Does the author follow any of the templates provided in this book
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1 3 9
"BUT DON'T GET ME WRONG"
word for word? Did you find any forms of metacommentary not discussed in this chapter? If so, can you identify them, name them, and perhaps devise templates based on them for use in your own writing? And finally, how do you think the author's use of metacommentary enhances (or harms) his or her writing?
Complete each of the following metacommentary templates in any way that makes sense.
*■ In making a case for the medical use of marijuana, I am not saying that______________.
► But my argument will do more than prove that one particular industrial chemical has certain toxic properties. In this article, ! will also_________________.
► My point about the national obsessions with sports reinforces the belief held by many___________that_________________.
>• I believe, therefore, that the war is completely unjustified. But let me back up and explain how I arrived at this conclusion: ______________. In this way, I came to believe that this war is
a big mistake.
"HE SAYS CONTENDS"
Using the Templates to Revise
One of the most important stages of the writing process is revision, when you look at a draft with an eye for how well you've made your argument and what you need to do to make it better. The challenge is to figure out what needs work—-and then what exactly you need to do.
Sometimes you'll have specific comments and suggestions from a teacher, noting that you need to state your position more explicitly, that your point is unclear, that you've misunderstood an author you're summarizing, and so forth. But what if you don't have any such guidance, or aren't sure what to do with it? The list of guidelines below offers help and points you back to relevant advice and templates in this book.
Do you present your argument as a response to what others say ? Do you make reference to other views besides your own? Do you use voice markers to distinguish clearly for readers between your views and those of others? In order to make your argument as convincing as possible, would it help to add more concessions to opposing views, using "yes but" templates?
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SLgVEK       "HE Wt¥* CONTENDS"
Asking yourself these large-scale revision questions will help you see how welt you've managed the "they say / I say" framework and this in turn should help you see where further revisions are needed. The checklist below follows the order of chapters in this book.
How Do You Represent What Others Say?
Do you start with what others say? If not, try revising to do so. See pages 23-28 for templates that can help.
Do you summarize or paraphrase what they've said? If so, have you represented their views accurately—and adequately?
Do you quote others? Do you frame each quotation successfully, integrating it into your text? Does the quotation support your argument? Have you introduced each quotation adequately, naming the person you're quoting (and saying who that person is if your readers won't know)? Do you explain in your own words what the quotation means? Do you then clearly indicate how the quotation bears on your own argument? See pages 45-47 for tips on creating a "quotation sandwich."
Check the verbs you use to introduce any summaries and quotations: do they express accurately what was said? If you've used common signal phrases such as "X said" or "Y believes," is there a verb that reflects more accurately what was said? See pages 40-41 for a list of verbs for introducing summaries and quotations.
Have you documented all summaries and quotations, both with parenthetical documentation in your text and a references or works-cited list?
Using the Templates to Revise
Do you remind readers of what others say at various points throughout your text? If not, see pages 27-28 for help revising in order to do so.
What Do You Say?
Do you agree, disagree, or both with those you're responding to? Have you said so explicitly?
If you disagree, do you give reasons why you disagree? If you agree, what more have you added to the conversation? If you both agree and disagree, do you do so without confusing readers or seeming evasive?
Have you stated your position and the one it responds to as a connected unit?
What reasons and evidence do you offer to support your "I say"? In other words, do your argument and the argument yon are responding to—your "I say" and "they say"-—address the same topic or issue, or does a switch occur that takes you on a tangent that will confuse readers? One way to ensure that your "I say" and "they say" are aligned rather than seeming like ships passing in the night is to use the same key terms in both. See Chapter 8 for tips on how to do so.
Will readers be able to distinguish what you say from what others say? See Chapter 5 for advice about using voice markers to make that distinction clear, especially at moments When you are moving from your view to someone else's view or back.
142
143
Si,RVS;-       "HE SA¥S- CONTENDS"
Have You Introduced Any Naysayers?
Have you acknowledged likely objections to your argument? If so, have you represented these views fairly—and responded to them persuasively? See Chapter 6 for tips on how to do so.
If not, think about what other perspectives exist on your topic, and incorporate them into your draft.
Have You Used Metacommentary to Clarify What You Do or Don't Mean?
No matter haw clearly you've explained your points, it's a good idea to explain what, you mean—or don't mean—with phrases like "in other words" or "don't get me wrong." See Chapter 10 for examples of how to do so.
Do you have a title? If so, does it tell readers what your main point or issue is, and does it. do so in a lively manner? Should you add a subtitle to elaborate on the title?
Have You Tied It All Together?
Can readers follow your argument from one sentence and paragraph to the next and see how each successive point supports your overall argument?
Cheek your itse of transitions, words like "however" and "therefore." Such words make clear how your ideas relate to one another; if you need to add transitions, see pages 105-06 for a complete list.
Check your use of pointing words. Do you use common pointers like "this" and "that," which help lead readers from one sentence
Using the Templates to Revise
to the next? If so, is it always clear what "this" and "that" refer to, or do you need to add nouns in order to avoid ambiguity? See pages 108-10 for help working with pointing words.
Have you used what we call "repetition with a difference" to help connect parts of your argument? See pages 112—H for examples of how to do so.
Have You Shown Why Your Argument Matters?
Don't assume that readers will see why your argument is important—or why they should care. Be sure that you have told them why. See Chapter 7 if you need help.
A REVISED STUDENT ESSAY
Here is an example of how one student, Antonia Peacocke, used this book to revise an essay. Starting with an article she'd written for her high school newspaper, Peacocke then followed the advice in our book as she turned her article into a college-level academic essay. Her original article was a brief account of why she liked Family' Guy, and her first step in revising was to open with a "they say" and an "I say," previewing her overall argument in brief form at the essay's beginning. While her original version had acknowledged that many find the show "objectionable," she hadn't named these people or indicated why they didn't like the show. In her revised version, after doing further research, Peacocke identified those with whom she disagreed and responded to them at length, as the essay itself illustrates.
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"HE SAY-S- CONTENDS"
In addition, Peacocke strengthened existing transitions, added new ones, and clarified the stakes of her argument, saying more explicitly why readers should care about whether Family Guy is good or bad. In making these revisions she gave her own spin to several templates in this book.
We've annotated Peacocke's essay in the margins to point out particular rhetorical moves discussed in our book and the chapters in which those discussions appear. We hope studying her essay and our annotations will suggest how you might craft and revise your own writing.
Antonia Peacocke wrote this essay in the summer between high school and her first year at Harvard. She is now a PhD student in philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley.
Family Guy and Freud: Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
ANTONIA PEACOCKE
While slouching in front of the television after a long day, you probably don't think a lot about famous psychologists of the twentieth century. Somehow, these figures don't come up often in prime-time—-or even daytime—TV programming. Whether you're watching Living Lohan or the NewsHour, the likelihood is that you are not thinking of Sigmund Freud, even if you've heard of his book Jokes and Their Relation to the L/nconsctous. I say that you should be.
What made me think of Freud in the first place, actually, was Family Guy, the cartoon created by Seth MacFarlane. (Seriously—stay with me here.) Any of my friends can tell you that this program holds endless fascination for me; as a matter ot fact, my high school rag-sheet "perfect mate" was the baby Stewie Griffin, a character on the show (see Fig. 1). Embarrassingly enough, I have almost reached the point at which 1 can perform
Starts with what others, are saying (Chapter 1)
Responds to what they say (Chapter 4)
Metacommen-tary wards. . off potential. skepticism (Chapter 10/. .