Academic Writing Templates That Actually Help
Most graduate students hit the same wall around their third semester paper: they have research, they have analysis, and they still can't produce a draft that doesn't read like a series of unrelated observations. The "They Say/I Say" framework from Graff and Birkenstein addresses exactly this problem. The method teaches writers to enter academic conversations by summarizing what others have argued before presenting their own response. It is straightforward. It is not revolutionary, but it is effective enough that the book has circulated widely across university writing centers and composition courses. The book offers a collection of rhetorical templates for situating claims, acknowledging counterarguments, and structuring evidence. These templates are essentially fill-in-the-blank sentence frames that force you to make your argument's relationship to existing scholarship explicit. A common example: "While many scholars have argued that X, I will show that Y." That single frame prevents the most common undergraduate mistake—launching into an original argument without first establishing what intellectual terrain you are occupying. I have watched students turn a 4,000-word mess into a coherent draft after learning to use these frames consistently throughout their prose. One thing the book does not emphasize enough: these templates can sound mechanical if you apply them uniformly. I ran into this issue while mentoring a master's student who was drafting a literature review. Every transition sentence followed the exact "They say... I say..." pattern. Her committee flagged the writing as robotic and demanded more organic synthesis. The fix was to vary the framing devices—sometimes leading with the counterargument, sometimes burying the attribution inside a longer sentence, sometimes dropping the template language entirely once the conversational posture became clear. The templates are scaffolding, not the final structure.
Here is a nuance most users miss. The method assumes you can identify a genuine "they say" position before you write. That sounds obvious, but many students conflate a source summary with engaging an argument. Summarizing Smith (2019) on page two is not the same as identifying what Smith is claiming and why it matters to your position. The template only works when you actually understand the stance you are responding to. I spent weeks correcting a doctoral candidate's drafts because she was using "they say" frames around sources she had only skimmed. The resulting paragraphs were structurally correct but substantively hollow. She ended up doing a proper close read of each source first, then returning to the templates. The quality difference was immediate. Another limitation worth stating plainly. This framework is designed primarily for humanities and social science writing where argumentation depends on engaging existing discourse. If you are writing in STEM fields where the convention emphasizes methods and results over rhetorical engagement, these templates will feel forced and may actually hurt your writing. I have seen engineering and biology students try to force "they say/I say" structures into lab reports, producing paragraphs that confused reviewers more than they helped. In those contexts, straightforward descriptive transitions work better. The practical workflow I recommend is this: read your sources with a pen, marking every claim that relates to yours. Then pick a template that matches your intended rhetorical move—agreeing, disagreeing, qualifying, extending. Insert your content. Then strip out any template language that does not serve the argument. Usually about thirty percent of the scaffolding gets removed in that revision pass. This process typically takes someone with average writing speed about forty-five minutes per section, whereas drafting without a framework often takes two hours with worse results.
I would also note that several free summaries and lecture recordings from University of California, Los Angeles composition courses cover the same material that appears in the book. If you are trying to access a pirated PDF, you may be able to find comparable instruction through your institution's library databases at no additional cost. Many universities subscribe to educational platforms that include Graff and Birkenstein's materials as part of their composition resources. Your campus writing center may also have printed copies available for checkout. The core technique remains useful regardless of which version you access. The habit of explicitly positioning your argument against existing scholarship is what separates competent academic writing from amateur writing. That habit is what the book teaches, and it is worth learning even if the delivery method feels formulaic at first.
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