Top Highlights

• We continue to be thrilled by the reception of our book, which has now sold over a million copies and is assigned in more than 1,500 (over half) the colleges and universities in the United States.
• Throughout the chapter are numerous templates that provide writers with language for entering into conversations and debates with these “they says”: published critics, classmates and teachers, their own previous interpretations, and the authors of literary works themselves.
• We found that when students read over their drafts with an eye for the rhetorical moves represented by the templates they were able to spot gaps in their argument, concessions they needed to make, disconnections among ideas, inadequate summaries, poorly integrated quotations, and other questions they needed to address when revising.
• Finally, this edition adds a new chapter on writing online exploring the debate about whether digital technologies improve or degrade the way we think and write, and whether they foster or impede the meeting of minds. And given the importance of online communication, we’re pleased that our book now has its own blog, theysayiblog.
• Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind, in which he looks at academic conversations from the perspective of those who find them mysterious and proposes ways in which such mystification can be overcome.