THEY SAY/I SAY, Graff and Birkenstein's Templates for Improving your Writing:

Why Templates?
1. “As soon as possible you state your position and the one it’s responding to together…think of the two as a unit.” (19)
2. “State your Own Ideas as a Response to Others”
3. These templates are all about mimicking sound writing. Have you ever seen someone do something that you want to do on the basketball court or soccer field, in the pool or in a car, on a skateboard or with a guitar? This is the same thing on paper. You should be mimicking the moves of great writers.

The Most Important Templates:
On the one hand, __________. On the other hand, __________.
Author X contradicts herself. At the same time that she argues __________, she also implies __________.
I agree that __________.
She argues __________, and I agree because __________.
Her argument that __________ is supported by new research showing that __________.
In recent discussions of __________, a controversial issue has been whether __________. On the one hand, some argue that __________. On the other hand, however, others argue that __________.

Introducing Standard Views:
Americans today tend to believe that __________.
Conventional wisdom has it that __________.
My whole life I have heard it said that __________.

Making those Views Something You Say: I have always believed that __________.
When I was a child, I used to think that __________.

Writing a Summary:
She demonstrates that __________.
In fact, they celebrate the fact that __________.

Introducing a Quote:
X insists, “__________.”
As the prominent philosopher X puts it, “__________.”
According to X, “__________.”
In her book, Book Title, X maintains that __________.
X complicates matters further when she writes that __________.

Disagreeing:
I think that X is mistaken because she overlooks __________.
I disagree with X’s view that __________ because, as recent research has shown, __________.

Introducing Your Point of View:
X overlooks what I consider an important point about __________.
I wholeheartedly endorse what X calls __________.
My discussion of X is in fact addressing the larger matter of __________.
These conclusions will have significant applications in __________ as well as in __________.