Two Ears, One Mouth and an Honest Heart: How to Actually Start Writing Academically and be a Critical Thinker
are you scared that you are not ready to give an opinion? Yet you have a really good point waiting to get out of your body? and you want to just yell it and run?
well, this will help with the yelling part, running you have to do yourself.
Ever since my tenth standard examination, I understood that the state had granted the power of writing upon me. I, from that moment onwards could write and people would have to listen to my interpretations and opinions no matter how bad they were. All of us who live in this world, literate, illiterate any other crowthousand binaries, we all have opinions that are formed out of what we listen as we grow up, from parents, family, teachers and the rest of the ecosystem. Most of these opinions though half baked, seem right to us, they have some point. They might even be original thoughts, but alas, Socrates and Plato was here before us, they said a lot of things, things we noticed in fourth standard, but because those people were earlier to the party than us, our opinions sort of looses its luster. Yet, sometimes we have this keen desire to disagree with some of them, we know from our hearts and sometimes from our logical thinking that we have a very valid point, but we are scared, who are we to voice it out, how would we scream it at people and bear the consequences and will people even listen to us? Today, I am honored to present in front of you a book that will solve all these problems: They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing, a Book by Cathy Birkenstein and Gerald Graff. The book in and of itself is very easy to read and accessible and should be read. The theory they put forward is in the title: They Say, I Say. This is all there is to Academic writing. One quote the authors had quoted from Kenneth Burke in the book about Academic writing made me fall in love with the book among other things. In the quote, the world of intellectual exchange is like a never ending conversation at a party where:
You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. . . . You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you. . . . The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.
Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form
Two Ears, One Mouth and an honest Heart.
The crux of the book is and all that there is to meaningful and honest engagement with the academic intellectual world is in listening honestly, understanding, and in responding with our own ideas. Birkenstein and Graff says that their vision of academic writing and of responsible public discourse—resides not just in stating our own ideas but in listening closely to others around us, summarizing their views in a way that they will recognize, and responding with our own ideas in kind. This is necessary for a couple of reasons, the first one being of course, that it is how knowledge works, we build upon whatever was built by our predecessors, and as the homepage of Google Scholar says: We stand on the Shoulder of Giants. Moreover, to enter a conversation, we need to know whatever has been said, if not all of it, then the gist of it. The book also interestingly says that, it is also one of the reasons we make arguments and voice our opinions, we do that when we are provoked, and when we have a reference point to begin with, people will actually understand what we are saying, why we are saying it and why in the actual world it is important. As the authors write: To put our point another way, framing your "I say" as a response to something "they say" gives your writing an element of contrast without which it won't make sense. It may be helpful to think of this crucial element as an "as-opposed-to-what factor" and, as you write, to continually ask yourself, "Who says otherwise?" and "Does anyone dispute it?" Behind the audience's "Yeah, so?" and "Why is he telling us this?"
This is not merely about academic writing, this is how critical thinking works. At a deeper level what the book is teaching us is to be “ a certain type of person: a critical, intellectual thinker who, instead of sitting passively on the sidelines, can participate in the debates and conversations of your world in an active and empowered way.”
I would love to quote the whole book here, but go and read it, it goes into detail about these topics, giving more philosophical yet practical ideas on how to actually implement this in your writing. It teaches you how to summarise and quote others, it teaches you the best ways to respond to what they say, it teaches you to how to actually structure and write your arguments and it even tells you how to engage in comment wars online and real ugly wars in the classroom.
Once we understand how to engage with knowledge, the rest is all a matter of technicality, discipline and of course at the root of it all Adab. I have written a bit on these, check them out if you haven’t read already:
I say that at the root of it all is Adab because, Adab is about recognition, and this process of listening to others, understanding them, analysing their arguments and contrasting them with our own and finally voicing out our own opinions is the actual process of Adab. It is through such processes that recognition of our place in the world is understood, recognised and enables us to act the right way. The only true deed one has to do, and really the only true choice a human being makes in the world is one of honesty, and he will always know deep inside himself whether he took the honest choice, and that is all that Allah looks at. It is this value of honesty that will lead us to truth, it is this honesty that tells us that we are inefficient by ourselves and need to listen to others because they know what we do not. It is this honesty that compels us to speak, because we know that whatever point we have to say makes sense and is the truth and will help others. It is this honesty that if kept up, that will take us to true knowledge, true Adab.
Wallahu A’lam and Allah Knows Best.
Subscribe to receive my posts for free directly into your inbox
I've been teaching academic writing for nearly two decades now. You've summed up the crux quite nicely, but different disciplines have different adab protocols. STEM subjects differ to the humaties for example.