The Originality Stigma

     I am a notorious skeptic.  Upon picking up Graff and Birkenstein’s They Say I Say, I was not sure I believed that this book should be “required reading for faculty and students” or “would make for a better classroom—and a more articulate world” as one critic remarked.  I wondered: how could a two hundred-page book teach me how to be a better writer or a more effective writing assistant?  Maybe this was my naïve know—it—all young man attitude speaking, but nevertheless, I was skeptical.  However, after reading the sections on agreeing and disagreeing in academia, I now have a greater appreciation for They Say I Say.  In fact, Graff and Birkenstein’s points on creating originality and potential ways to foster originality were quite intriguing.

     As a student, one thing I am always mindful of is ensuring that I create an original argument one way or another.  From my relatively small amount of academic experience it seems to me that this may be a universal problem for students.  In fact, Graff and Birkenstein acknowledge this when they voice a common student concern “it often may seem that you need to be an expert in a field to have an argument at all” (55).  This is the sort of stigma that should be a priority for us to exterminate.  How would we ever go about doing this, students always push back and claim they can never make a better argument than a professional academic?  I have been searching for an answer to this question and could not seem to find a lead.  Although I am still looking, Graff and Birkenstein have helped me in my search.  In fact, Graff and Birkenstein’s use of templates have definitely pointed me in the right direction.  They offer the explanation that, either for agreeing or disagreeing with a claim, students can draw emphasis to a point the original author had not.  To illustrate this, the authors provided us with some very explicit templates.  Ones that resonated with me that I think should be introduced to students are: “X’s theory of ______ is extremely useful because it sheds light on the difficult problem of _________”, or “X is surely right about_____­­­­­­­___ because, as she may not be aware, recent studies have shown that________” (62).  Although this clearly does not explicitly help us find a way to beat the “originality stigma”, I think the answer may be in the templates.  To sum it all up Graff and Birkenstein offered the comforting words to aspiring academics and myself “as long as you can support a view taken by someone else without merely restating what he or she has said, there is no reason to worry about being ‘unoriginal’” (63).   If students were exposed to templates like this it may help them think of making arguments in a new way.  Maybe it is as simple as showing students these templates, but the septic inside of me wonders—maybe not?

     Writing this blog post has proven to be a very stressful but very valuable experience for me.  It has put me in the shoes of the writer instead of just the potential writing consultant.  In essence, after writing this post I now have a better feel of what it is like to be the student requesting help.  It surely is intimidating knowing that fifteen other bright students will be critiquing and responding to my work.  All my worried thoughts and questions about my writing have bubbled to the surface.  I am worried that the preceding paragraph is too long or does not make a coherent point, I have misspelled things, or used incorrect grammar.  I think this exercise has proved even more to me the importance of being approachable to the student because submitting one's academic work to another is scary!  Moreover, I realize even more that it is important that the student doesn’t feel judged.  We are supposed to be supportive not unapproachable.  I think a perfect example of how you may have judged my work was my intentional typo of “skeptic” in the previous paragraph.  I typed the word “septic” instead of “skeptic”.  In this situation you may have judged me.  Maybe you laughed and thought how careless I must have been, but either way you passed some sort of judgment.  I think it is important to limit this as much as possible when it comes to the students.  To truly make an impact on the students they need to see us as their peers not a superior.  Consultants need to be approachable!

          Mitchell Kneeshaw

Works Cited

Graff, Gerald, and Cathy Birkenstein. They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in     Academic Writing. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2010. Print.